We were inspired last week when author Alec Nevala-Lee chose the date of his book release to make public for the first time a really amazing document from Scientology’s early history. And since we had a book of our own come out this week, we thought we’d do the same.
In the summer of 1972, a really curious thing happened. The year before, journalist Paulette Cooper had written her harsh expose, The Scandal of Scientology, and she then helped her friend Robert Kaufman, a former Scientologist, publish his own tell-all about the church, Inside Scientology. They were both then stunned when someone came forward to help Kaufman promote his book — it was L. Ron Hubbard Jr., son of Scientology’s founder.
At that point, Kaufman was hoping his publisher would put out a second edition, and he thought it would be a good idea for Ron Jr. — known as “Nibs” to the family — to write a foreword to it. And so, for several weeks in the late summer of 1972, Nibs worked with Paulette to produce a 63-page manuscript about the origin of Scientology.
Kaufman’s second edition never happened, and the essay Nibs wrote with Paulette’s help was never published.
We quoted a few lines from the manuscript in our own 2015 book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, but the entire 63-page, 15,000-word essay has never been made public. But now, inspired by Alec Nevala-Lee, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
You may be familiar with some of the things Nibs said about Scientology and his father which came later in his life — an infamous and kind of wild interview he did with Penthouse magazine in 1983 after he had adopted the name “Ron DeWolf,” or some things of his that we’ve published for the first time here, including a 1985 letter he wrote to the IRS. There’s also some bizarre material he wrote in the 1980s that his grandson, Jamie DeWolf, made public in an unforgettable performance.
But in 1972, and with the help of a journalist, Paulette Cooper, Nibs produced a much more sober, and really devastating takedown of his father and the background to Dianetics and Scientology. We think you’ll agree that there are some real bombshells in this account. Nibs was born in 1934 and after 1937 he was largely abandoned by his father. But in 1952, Hubbard came back into his son’s life and asked him to come to Phoenix as he was transforming Dianetics into Scientology. For several years, Nibs explains, he was a major part of developing and delivering Scientology. But by 1959, he was disillusioned and broke, and he left the movement. In the 1960s, he even testified against Scientology in its tax battles with the government. And by 1972, he was ready to help his father’s critics, Kaufman and Cooper. But then, just weeks after finishing this piece of writing, in November 1972 he switched sides again and testified on behalf of Scientology (without telling Paulette about it).
By the early 1980s, Nibs was once again causing problems for his father. He sued in 1982, claiming that Hubbard had actually died and that his Scientology minions were keeping the truth from the public. It wasn’t true, Hubbard was simply in hiding, but Nibs’ suit was, for a short time, one of Scientology’s biggest headaches.
Hubbard died in 1986, his son died of complications from diabetes just a few years later, in 1991. But we think you will find this snapshot from 1972 a truly remarkable stripping down of the Hubbard myth by his own son, who was there during some of Scientology’s most crucial early years. Here is the document in its entirety.
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A LOOK INTO SCIENTOLOGY
OR
ONE/TENTH OF 1 PERCENT OF SCIENTOLOGY
BY
L. RON HUBBARD, JR.
As the oldest son of L. Ron Hubbard, the man who started, created and is still the unquestioned leader of Dianetics and Scientology, I am often asked certain questions about Scientology and my father. The most often asked question is whether Scientology is a con game, or whether it is a sincere movement that has benefited its followers. People also want to know whether my father really believes in what he’s doing, or whether he is a charlatan who has found himself a good moneymaking proposition. Others want to know if there’s any validity to the machine used by Scientologists called an “E-meter,” and whether the Scientology “processing” or “auditing” techniques have really helped people? Are there any skeletons in the closet or secrets in my father’s past that could account for some of the very unconventional basic theories of Dianetics and Scientology such as the engrams caused by wifebeating and abortions? Is there any truth to the rumors that people in Dianetics and Scientology have ended up in a mental institution and that Scientology deliberately breaks up families? Is Scientology expensive, and does the money they take in go to my father or for research purposes as he claims? And finally, how many of the millions of words my father has written on Dianetic/Scientology theory have validity, and how many of them are just more of the fiction and science fiction that he wrote for years before he ever conceived of the idea of Dianetics or Scientology?
Before I start my story which answers these questions — probably not entirely to my father’s liking — I would like to emphasize that I am not trying to condemn or crucify L. Ron Hubbard. If any blame is to be ascribed for what has occurred then I must take a portion of the responsibility as well. After all, I spent some of those early years helping him to run Dianetics and Scientology and formulate its early theories and practices. Therefore, if Dianetics and Scientology has been responsible for any mental and physical deterioration among its followers, some of it is my fault as well as his.
Although I stopped having anything to do with Scientology ten years ago, and I have not seen my father for thirteen years, I love him and I know he also feels the same about me, my wife, and the six grandchildren we have given him. (My eldest son is L. Ron Hubbard III.) He sends birthday and Christmas cards to them and Dad and I still correspond. I know that if I were to visit him on his secret ship in the Mediterranean (“The Apollo” where he now lives and works with a large group of advanced Scientologists), I would be one of the few outsiders to be eagerly welcomed there by my father. Finally, I think most psychiatrists would agree that there is no real Oedipal problems here; all law courts would agree that there is no malice.
I probably spent more time with my father from the age of 17 to 25 than do most children with their Dads. Before that, though, I probably saw less of him than most children see of their fathers. Yet he probably had a greater influence on my early life than most Dads have on their children, for my father is the type of person effects everything around him regardless of whether he’s actually physically present.
One thing my father influenced (which most fathers have no effect on) is that my birth would be premature. Although many Scientologists believe that they can remember the details of their birth (and sometimes incidents that happened while they were in the womb), the following information came from my mother, Margaret Louise Grubb whom everyone called “Polly,” and grandmother, Ledora May and not my memory.
My father had a very fiery temper and he was not averse to using his fists as well as his words in order to emphasize a point to my mother. The night before I was born on May 7, 1934, 8:05 A.M., the two of them had a vicious fight after a party, and although my mother was approximately five months pregnant, he beat her up. She went into premature labor and I was born.
It was amazing that I even survived, for I weighed 2 pounds 2 ounces at birth. I was named L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., but immediately nicknamed “Nibs,” for all during my mother’s pregnancy, my grandfather kept asking her “How is his Nibs?” When I was born, they sent him a telegram saying “His Nibs is born,” so it became and still remains my nickname.
Although I remember nothing about those early days, I do remember my father beating up my mother when I was older, although I will say that he never was violent with his children. He only spanked me once when I was about 9, and I deserved it because I poured paint into his iced tea as a joke.
But the way he treated my mother was another matter. The odd thing is that husbands mistreating their pregnant wives came to play an important role in Dianetics theory upon with Scientology is based. In 1950, his first major book on Dianetics, “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” which became a best-seller, stated that “engrams” or impressions of pain and unconsciousness were the cause of most of our aberrations and problems. These engrams could occur at any time in our lives, or even at birth, or while we were a fetus, and incredibly in the past lives we have supposedly lived through, and many Scientologists believe that their current problems started in a past life, going back as far as 74 trillion years or more. In Dad’s first book, though, it was amazing how many of his case studies contained engrams caused by husbands or fathers who beat up wives or mothers while they were pregnant. Well, at least Dianetics and Scientology theory has some basis in truth, even if it is only my father’s truth.
The beatings weren’t the only thing that made the marriage unhappy. While it did technically last for 12 years, it was probably doomed from the beginning as are most marriages between two fiery, fiercely individualistic people; one of whom wants freedom and the other security. They argued about everything, including sex since he was very jealous of her and accused her of being unfaithful, which I don’t think was true. Yet in later years he admitted to me that he had often been unfaithful, and as I’ll explain shortly, he even married someone while he was still legally married to my mother.
Another cause of friction between them was that he claimed that he didn’t want children, although I was born one year after their marriage, and my sister Katy arrived less than two years after me. In addition, he had another child by his second marriage, four by his current one, and now has eight grandchildren in all. If he can’t “clear the planet” as he says, at least he’s helped to populate it. But in that first marriage he felt that children would tie him down and therein lay the crux of their marital problems. He wanted to do as he pleased, make money as he needed, and spend it however he wanted.
But like most women then, she was security minded and wanted a home, a family, and a predictable husband with a regular income. In those days Dad earned his living as a writer specializing in anything that would sell. He wrote pulp adventure for men’s magazines on the level of the Arabian-Prince-who-saves-the-kingdom and later Dad often wrote that Scientology would save the world. He also wrote westerns, science fiction (he was best-known for this), screen plays, and confession magazine stories as if he were a woman. He was capable of writing in so many different styles that he told me on two occasions he wrote every story in one magazine as if he were a different author. He wrote no outlines in advance, made no preparations, and he could write a novelette in one night with no rewrites. It helped that he typed 97 words a minute which was amazing since he only used 4 fingers.
Like most writers he went from rags to riches. There were periods of time that he made no money and we learned to live through the bad times and expected them when things were good. Both of them were heavy smokers and they would keep their cigarette butts in a jar so they could reroll them in rough times. But what also caused fights was that there were times that he made money but didn’t bring it home to us. I remember when we were cold stone broke and Dad wrote a novelette for which he was to receive $2,500 from a publisher. He went to pick up the money alone, but instead of bringing it back to us, he spent every dime to buy a boat. Naturally there was a battle royal when my mother discovered that we had no food in the house, but instead we had a boat, which Dad had named the “Magician.”
I only saw Sara on that one occasion, although I later met her daughter (my stepsister), another redhead (so am I) who is the absolute spittin’ image of Dad. Dad’s marriage with Sara was also unhappy and lasted only a few years. It made a number of papers when he divorced her, for by that time he had written his best-selling Dianetics book. He was therefore well enough known for the newspapers to reprint her juicy accusations that doctors had said that Dad was mentally disturbed, that he had beaten and tortured her while she was pregnant, and more.
Today my father is married to his third wife, Mary Sue, whom he met at one of the early Dianetics Centers in Witchita Kansas while she was a student there. Unlike his first two wives, she plays an active role and believes in what he is doing. Their four children are also Scientologists, and Dad’s first two marriages are generally not discussed in Scientology. I think they’ve been an embarrassment to some of the Scientologists who have been questioned about it; since Scientology and Dianetics supposedly makes marriage happier and more stable. But Scientologists have an explanation for his two unhappy marriages just as they have an answer to everything. They say that the reason his first two marriages didn’t work was that the wives weren’t Scientologists or Dianeticians. That Dianetics (and Scientology) didn’t exist during his first marriage is something they forget.
One of the few things my father had in common with his first wife, my mother, was flying. She was one of the first female pilots and he was an expert flyer. He even held a glider record, although I was never impressed with that accomplishment for he had won it in typical Hubbardian fashion — the easy way. Instead of doing something really daring or outstanding, which he was certainly capable of doing if he wanted to, he just kept circling the airport until he had stayed up longer than the current glider record and then he came down. It was not an impressive feat.
Still, I can understand why my mother was attracted to father although he was five years younger than she was. He was a good looking redhead with a great deal of charm and charisma, and he could talk easily on any subject whether or not he knew much of anything about it. He also had a fine singing voice and was on the radio a few times with Arthur Godfrey while he played his ukulele and sang. Even in his youth he had been outstanding. I don’t remember how old he was at the time but he was once the youngest Eagle Scout in the United States. He had achieved that in just one year, joining the Boy Scouts on one birthday and become an Eagle Scout on the next. Because of this, he met the President of the United States although he was not impressed. Years later, I read Dad’s notation of this event in his childhood diary, which said that shaking hands with him was “like shaking hands with a dead fish.”
Oddly enough, my father has never publicly admitted to his glider record, singing “career,” boy scout achievements, or meeting a President. Instead, he has written “biographies” about himself in Scientology magazines claiming that he was brought up on a cattle ranch, traveled extensively throughout Asia as a youth, was a blood brother of the Pikuni Indians, friends with Calvin Coolidge’s son as a child, the real life model for “Mr. Roberts” and more, none of which is true.
He has also been criticized for claiming academic degrees that he didn’t have, for while he said that he had a B.S. and a Ph.D., he flunked out of college and acquired one of his “Doctorates” from an alleged “diploma mill” where he later allowed Scientology to be taught through people affiliated with Dad. His followers are now trying to excuse him by saying “Who’s Who in the Southwest” and others originally published such information by mistake, and that other writers then picked it up. But in the example of “Who’s Who” they say that he was the one who provided them with the (false) information they published in the first place.
My father has always claimed that he started researching Dianetics in 1938, 12 years before he presented it, but the first time he said anything to me about it was in 1947 when he told me that he was thinking of writing a book “on a new mental science.” (During that same conversation he also told me that he was planning to marry Sara although I later learned that he had married her one year before.)
The next time I heard of Dianetics was in April of 1949 when my father called me and mentioned that an article he was writing on a subject called Dianetics would shortly be coming out in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. I was always delighted to see Dad’s name and stories in print but I was very unimpressed with his latest creation.
Later he sent me an expanded version of his theory, “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” which became a best seller and I had the same reaction. It was extremely boring and I strongly doubted whether my father had really written anything “scientific” as he had said. For Dad had always written only fiction to my knowledge and this seemed to be just more of the same.
Furthermore, in his book, he claimed to have tested and worked with hundreds of subjects before arriving at his extremely unique theories but that really wasn’t Hubbardian style. It seemed much more like to me that he had written this “science” off the top of his head as I had seen him do in his other writings. A few years later, he verified my suspicions and told me that he had written the book in three months. He also once showed me the house in which he had written this best-seller, and it would have been very hard for him to have used that small house in Bayhead New Jersey as a research laboratory or an analyst’s type office.
I was also suspicious of the little I read in that book since I felt that many of the “case studies” were really embellishments of his own experiences. The book had an uncomfortable ring of truth about it which seemed to reveal more about my father than the supposed people he studied. As I said, many of the men described in the book supposedly beat their pregnant wives, and with the exception of my father, I don’t think that’s a very common occurrence.
Then there was his abortion theory. So many of these people were supposed to have gotten engrams from attempted abortions (which my father called “AA”) that it’s been a source of amusement to many knowledgeable people. One woman was supposed to have tried to abort herself during one pregnancy with paste and lysol, by jumping down from a height, by having her husband sit on her stomach, and also by attempting it surgically 22 times which sounds like a medical impossibility.
But there was something in my father’s past that explains his obsession with abortions. The following incident happened in Bremerton Washington between January and September of 1941, and the reason I can pinpoint dates is that I moved 49 times by the time I was 19, and I have a list of each place I lived in and can relate incidents to the location. One night while we lived in that house in Washington, I remember being awakened in the middle of one terrifying night by my mother’s screams coming from the bedroom across the way. I snuck out of my room, walked across to theirs, and peaked into the room since the door was slightly ajar. All the lights were out in the house but there was a small light on in that room. I saw my mother lying on her back naked on the bed and my father sitting on her stomach, facing her feet. He was dressed in a Chinese robe with a multicolored (I believe black, red, green and yellow) dragon embroidered on the back of it.
I didn’t really understand what was happening, but I was petrified and ran to my bedroom and jumped back in bed trying not to think about the screams or what I had seen. It quieted down after a while, but then I heard more screaming and since I couldn’t sleep, I snuck out again. When I peaked in that time, I saw that now there was also a man there with a black bag, who I assume was a Doctor, and he kept telling my father that she had to be hospitalized. I still remember his exact words; he kept saying “it had to come out.” But I also remember that my father kept arguing and insisting that he would not let her go to the hospital.
That’s all I recall of this incident except that the next day I saw sheets in the garbage can with blood on them. When I was older, and had enough courage to admit to my mother that I had been watching that night, and to ask her exactly what had happened, she told me that he had forced her to have two abortions during their marriage.
Perhaps because some of the case studies in his book were uncomfortably familiar, I put off reading all of “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” from cover to cover until 1955. (In 1950 it was on the best seller list for several weeks.) I didn’t see my father the year he was a best selling author which wasn’t unusual for me since I hadn’t seen him since 1947.
Although we didn’t get together again until 1951, one day in 1950 he called me and suggested that I should try some Dianetic “auditing.”
This was the type of engram therapy that had been presented in his book. He offered to pay for my auditing if I would have it.
From that moment forward I have never had to pay for auditing. In fact, recently someone within his organization said Dad was offering me all the auditing and training I wanted at no charge; Although at times my sister Katy has paid for her own Scientology auditing. It probably was someone other than Dad making the offer on their own initiative. Dad usually communicated with me about such matters directly. Regardless of the source I respectfully declined.
His desire to give me as much Scientology “processing” and training as possible is understandable. During the years I was with him he told me many times he was personally grooming me to take his place. Could it be after all these years that he still has the same desire? Only Dad knows. In any event, I would again respectfully decline.
The fact that he wanted me to be audited I took as a sign that he sincerely believed that his new “science” worked. If he didn’t, why should he expose me to it? He arranged for my first auditing to take place at a nearby Dianetic Center and he wanted it done under an assumed name. It was a good idea, for by then my father was not just respected by Dianeticians, he was virtually worshipped by many of them. These people would have become totally shook up and incapable of working on my “case” if they knew who I really was.
[part of page missing]ature being what it is, I eventually did reveal it to them, [missing]ect was disastrous. First they stared at me as if they were [missing] the son of a God. After that, the auditing sessions became [missing]g sessions and it was useless to continue. Maybe that was for [missing], for my father’s Dianetic auditing hadn’t done very much for me [missing] To give just one example, Dianetic auditing was supposed to help [missing] to see better, and we worked on this since I had poor eyesight and I had to wear my glasses all the time, which I still do. Through Dianetic auditing they tried to get me to remove my glasses, but when I did so, I got migraine headaches. So despite Dianetics, I had to continue to wear my glasses secretly to keep from upsetting my father. He didn’t want others to see that Dianetics and Scientology hadn’t improved my eyesight as he had claimed it could for everyone else. I didn’t wear them in public until after I left Scientology.
Another reason my auditing didn’t have any great results for me was that I was only audited on some things. My father had specifically left instructions for me to be audited on my mother, which leads me now to believe that he may have had me audited not only to help me with my emotional problems, but to absolve him in my mind of any responsibility for them. He always said that my problems had all been my mother’s fault. Only as I get older now do I realize he was highly contributory toward them.
In 1951 Dad came to my grandfathers winter home where I was staying in Phoenix with his third wife, Mary Sue, and spoke to me about the possibility of working on Dianetics with him. The idea thrilled the hell out of me. Here my father had ignored me all those years, and now suddenly he wanted me to work with him. Even though we had spent so little of my youth together, in my eyes he was 12 feet tall and glowed in the dark. I desperately wanted to be equal to him, worthy of him, and do anything to please him. I believed he was tremendous and as a teenager I was also impressed that he was famous and knew other famous people as well. Through his science fiction writing, he knew writers like A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, etc. Through Dianetics, and by virtue of becoming a best-selling author, he had met many famous actors and actresses and had even audited a few. I was a teenager with a terrible inferiority complex, maybe because I had been constantly shunted back and forth between my mother and grandfather which could have made me feel unwanted. It didn’t help any that I had seen my father so little, but I ascribed no blame to him for this and I absolutely worshipped him and believed that he could do no wrong.
He wanted me to return to the Pacific Northwest with my grandparents to finish my junior year of high school. Education was very important to him; at least for his children. He sealed the bargain and reestablished our relationship by giving me a fabulous present, a 1947 Buick and $100 for gas. That especially delighted me because he had forgotten so many of my birthday and Christmas presents before that. Before he and Mary Sue left he said he would keep in touch to let me know where to meet him. After several letters I arranged to meet him in Phoenix Arizona in August of 1952: Not knowing that Dianetics had changed into Scientology and not aware of the plans my father had for me. I was quickly to find out.
Within a few short weeks I became the head of the newly formed “Hubbard College” as Director of Training and Chief Instructor. I started living with my father at his home. I was being paid $50 a week, which wasn’t bad for 1952. I gained instant respect from students and pre-clears and more importantly; I was one with my father at last. I was bursting with pride. After all, I was only an 18 year old kid who hadn’t even finished high school yet.
For years I had been in continual emotional turmoil, with poor marks in school and few friends. Suddenly I had become an Instant Expert. An expert with power. It was pure ecstasy.
As usual, while in Scientology, I was never a student; publicly that is. Always the instructor. Every Scientology course I was involved in I just sort of learned the material as I went along. But when Dad and I were alone together I was his most apt and attentive pupil, on how to build and run organizations and how to handle people.
When I first arrived in Phoenix the only organization we had was “The Office of L. Ron Hubbard” quartered in a small one room building on Central Avenue with a staff of one. This quickly changed and the “Hubbard Association of Scientologists, Inc.” was created. I became a stockholder and was elected to the board of directors. Which happily added further laurels to my crown. A state of affairs for me that was to continue for many years.
While Dad had been involved in three previous Dianetic Foundations which had failed for one reason or another the H.A.S. was the beginning of the highly complex and to some, confusing universe of Scientology that exists today.
To some it might even look like an Alice-in-Wonderland turned upside down and wrong side out. It probably doesn’t bother too many present day Scientologists. They have had to develop good maze brightness.
Dad and Mary Sue went to England in September 1952 to expand our organizations there. I stayed in Phoenix and was, in effect, Mr. Scientology in the U.S.A. Things were going beautifully on all fronts.
But in December of 1952 I went to Philadelphia to attend a lecture series on Scientology given by my father and a couple of unpleasant incidents happened there. Before I got to Philadelphia, there had been some bankruptcy problems in Dad’s Witchita Dianetic Center. As a result, in the middle of a lecture, U.S. Marshalls stormed into our Philadelphia hall in order to serve a subpoena on my father. The lecture hall was filled with about 35 or 40 people including a man I’ll call Joe. He was about 6’4″, weighed 280 pounds, and although he was missing one hand which he had deliberately cut off to stay out of World War II, he was a very tough and threatening looking fellow. Like many Scientologists, he was absolutely totally devoted to my father and Dad didn’t seem to mind that Joe earned his living as a loan shark. Joe’s favorite expression when he didn’t like what someone was doing or when they didn’t make loan payments was to say “I’m going to go have a conversation with him.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but when Joe said it, it really meant that he was going to beat the person up.
Joe wasn’t going to allow any marshalls to make my father look bad even if they were armed and belligerent. He bravely (and foolishly) shoved one of the marshalls and a fight started in which people were thrown around and knocked down the stairs. Dad realized the futility of such a fight, especially when the marshalls drew their guns, and he quieted everyone down. I think the upshot was that they finally served Dad and he had to put up a $5,000 bond. The whole incident was very humiliating to him. He did not like to be pushed around, especially publicly, and it may have effected his decision to make Scientology a religion and less vulnerable to the law. But more about that later.
During this same period of time, Dad also had problems within the organization which the same Joe solved in a unique manner. An oversized woman I’ll call Sally, and her boyfriend (who was half her height and 10 years her junior) had set up that Philadelphia Center and had been very successful with it. It has always been my father’s policy to take over any franchise that was firmly established and doing well, but then the opposite happened. Sally and her little boyfriend tried to take over the Philadelphia office from him. Forcing him to set up another center in Camden New Jersey using his Arizona H.A.S. corporation. She tried to squeeze my father out of his own organization and gain control of Scientology U.S. She wouldn’t give my father the 10 percent he usually took in from his franchises or any portion of the money she collected, plus his tapes, book and facilities which were certainly due to him. I don’t think she was just trying to take over for nothing, but I think she envisioned herself as my father’s manager and would have liked to have bought him out for 3 cents if she could.
Dad was naturally frustrated over the whole situation and he told me to speak to Joe and tell him what was happening. I realized the implications of this but I had absolute loyalty toward my father. I followed his instructions and Joe promised to “go and have a conversation” with Sally. When we were all seated around the dinner table hours later, Joe came over and told us to look outside in his car. It was filled with Dad’s books and tapes as well as Sally’s secret accounting records. Joe was laughing his head off as he told us that Sally’s boyfriend had helped him to load his car.
The next day, or maybe it was two days later, Sally and her boyfriend came over to see my father at the Camden Center and the minute she walked in, you could tell from her face that she had been “having a conversation.” She meekly signed cards, checks, quick claim deeds, resignation as director and various papers that turned the Philadelphia Center over to my father. Then Sally and her boyfriend left like beaten dogs, and I never saw them again.
Years later I saw an advertisement in a Scientology magazine for a Scientology center which was being run by the same Sally again. It is not uncommon for people who leave Scientology involuntarily to come back during one of their “amnestys.” As if he were a King, on my father’s birthday (and other occasions) he has granted amnesty to those who have been kicked out of Scientology. It’s really not quite as magnanimous or forgiving as it seems on his part for those who have been kicked out usually have to take Scientology courses and processing to get back in. But it never ceases to amaze me how people like Sally take advantage of this amnesty to crawl back to those who have kicked them. It’s not just Sally for I’ve seen it happen often. I don’t know whether their returning to Scientology shows my father’s compassion in taking them back in, or their foolishness or masochism that they want to come back after they’ve been so badly treated.
I don’t think people are physically beaten up any more, but they certainly are verbally. When someone in Scientology is kicked out, papers are circulated about them accusing them of “crimes” which tend to be Scientological (e.g. saying something against L. Ron Hubbard), although sometimes it’s even criminal. One couple was accused of blackmailing people, although I have met them and am certain the accusations are unfounded.
To digress for a moment, it is often asked whether people have been blackmailed in Scientology since so much of their personal life is revealed in their auditing sessions. When I was there the direct answer was “no” but there was open use of the files which contained all of the people’s records. These files were open to almost anyone in the organization, including my father, were not locked, or stamped “confidential.” They said what processes were run, what the meter said, and what the person said. While the first and second were probably unimportant, the third wasn’t and it was sometimes used to get people back into Scientology who had left or to get them to pay their bills. It was also used to scare people as well they threatened to turn people’s files over to the police if they didn’t straighten things out.
In the first few years after my father turned his best-selling book into a business, he made three major changes in the operation which still effect the movement today: He changed Dianetics into Scientology, he made it a religion, and he added the E-meter. Most people think Dianetics became Scientology because various agencies and influential people had spoken out against Dianetics. Changing its name would change its image and divorce itself from the maligned group. That may be true, but it was not the main reason. The real reason was that Dad’s third center in Witchita had been set up by an early Dianeticist named Don G. Purcell who somehow got my father to sell him the rights to “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.” Not only did Purcell buy the rights to my father’s book, but also the right to use the name “Dianetics,” although it had been my father’s writings and theories that had made the name “Dianetics” worth something. Still once my father sold out, he couldn’t use it.
As a result, while keeping most of the theories, Dad changed the name to “Scientology” or “the science of knowing,” which he borrowed (without mentioning that) from the German philosopher Nordenholtz. it was only in 1955 when Dad completed various litigation problems with the Wichita Center and he was able to get back the rights to his book, and the name “Dianetics.” Even though he had continued to use Dianetics regardless of its legal status. But by that time, Scientology had built a huge active following, far greater than Dianetics had, and was so known it didn’t pay for him to drop that name. Plus Scientology gave him a wider range of creative and investigative expression. He didn’t want to lose the Dianetics believers either so he began promoting both by marrying them so to speak.
Today the name they generally use (and call themselves in public) is Scientology. Still I have read that when Scientology began to be discredited, as happened for example in the late ’60’s when Scientologists were barred from entering England and the Government decided to start an Inquiry on Scientology, the members began calling the movement Dianetics again.
I have always found it interesting that my father turned Scientology into a religion, for I had never known him to be a religious man, attend Church or even talk of God. But in the winter of 1953 he had a lawyer look into religion as a corporate structure. He may have been thinking about such a move for quite a while. He had experienced many difficulties with the business end of Dianetics and Scientology. There were the taxes, the Wichita bankruptcy, the harassment (in his opinion) by U.S. Marshalls in Philadelphia, the denunciation by the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association claimed that he was practicing medicine without a license since Dianetics had claimed to cure just about every one of man’s ills.
In all fairness to my father, Scientology was beginning to address the being more and more, but I believe that the growing spiritual side of Scientology was definitely secondary. What I think really interested Dad (and I said this when I testified for the Government in their case against Scientology in Washington, D.C., for taxes) was that calling his group a religion gave him more latitude in regard to corporate structure, made it harder for people and groups to try to get him to curb his activities and gave him tax exemption.
Scientology has been having some problems on this last point, for while they are tax free (as a religion) right now, the Internal Revenue Service won their contention that the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. must pay taxes. In court, they proved that from 1956-1959, that group made almost $800,000, and provided him with his home and car. The Scientologists are still appealing this (after losing twice) and are at the Supreme Court level. I imagine they will lose there (if the Supreme Court even agrees to review it) for while Americans are very liberal about what can call itself a religion, they are not so easy-going when it comes to what groups don’t have to pay taxes. If Scientology loses again, tax actions will probably be started against them in other parts of the country.
Dad probably foresaw none of these troubles on December 18, 1953 when my wife, other Scientologists and I officially signed the incorporation papers for the “Church of American Science,” which became the parent religious corporation. At the same time, we signed incorporation papers for two other Scientology churches. Such a move was not unusual for my father, for over the years he has used a number of different corporate names. While Scientology was supposed to be relatively simple, his corporate structure and organizations were complex. For example, there was Hubbard College, Organizations of America, Scientology Consultants for Industrial Efficiency, National Academy for American Psychology and others. Although I signed those first Church incorporation papers, it probably was illegal for me to do so because I was only 19 years old.
Another innovation in early Dianetics and later, Scientology which is now crucial to their processing or auditing was the introduction in the early ’50’s of a gadget called an “E-meter.” It’s a relatively small rectangular box with a meter face and some controls, with two soup cans (empty and without the labels) attached to it by a pair of wires. The person being audited held one of the cans in each hand.
During the early days all sorts of gadgets were used to connect up the guy: Finger stalls, rings, wrist straps, foot pads and even sponges. But alas, soup and sometimes vegetable juice cans were preferred by Dad; and so be it.
This meter supposedly registers thought above and below the conscious level and “reads” the “charge” (like a storage battery) in incidents and occurrences that have happened in the spirit, mind and body of a person.
The E-meter is really only a jazzed up galvanometer and is based on a balanced Wheatstone bridge (which measures differential resistance in an electric current).
Within Scientology practice and philosophy the “E-meter” literally tells the auditor what is inside the pre-clear, that is; where the road blocks are to his path to Total Freedom. Additionally the meter indicates what technique to use and the auditor can tell the pre-clear what his state of beingness is: The net result is that the E-meter is the guiding light; (or should I say guiding needle) the controlling and dictating heart of Scientology process. The E-meter, in reality, tells both the auditor and the pre-clear where they have gone, where they are at and where they are going.
Scientology claims to be “scientific” and if this is so they must be trying to remove the human error by letting a machine “tell them so.” I think George Orwell’s “Big Brother” would have been proud.
The E-meter was invented by a chiropractor named Volney Mathison who told him about it after hearing my father lecture one day. Mathison said to my father that he believed engrams might have charges which could be measured by his machine. At first, my father wanted nothing to do with it, and called Mathison a “squirrel,” an old Scientological term meaning a person who is not using Dad’s standard techniques.
Mathison refused to be discouraged so easily. He began secretly showing it to Dianeticians who tried it, liked it, and incorporated it into their auditing session. It was typical of Dad that he wouldn’t accept it until it became popular, and then he changed his mind. The original meters called “Mathison Electropsychometers” rangeing from a battery operated “Quiz Meter” costing $24.95. This meter was not intended for use by professional auditors, but was recommended for beginners, self processing experiments, etc.
In the middle was his “Mini-Meter” at $48.50 (later $35.00) and at the top was the Professional Model #H-53-DS at $98.50 (later $86.85).
There were a few experimental models costing up to $1,000 that did everything but hand the auditor a Printout, lights flashed, bells rang, buzzers went off and four dials with swinging needles supposedly indicated a variety of responses. But of course all of this was attached to the same ‘ol pair of soup cans. I don’t believe too many of Mathison’s “ultimate” models were sold. It was expensive but the main reason auditors didn’t use them was that it presented an awesome and generally intimidating sight to their pre-clears and had too many weird sounds that went off at odd times which interrupted the auditing session.
Most auditors preferred Mathison’s $98.50 model. After all, it was the one Dad used himself and the instruction book was only $1.80.
Like many people, Volney must have thought you can always make a good thing better. He sure kept trying. If he had had his way the poor auditors of the day would have had to use a moving van filled with electronic gear. This disturbed Dad, but I don’t think the main problem was with the E-meter or Volney’s enthusiasm but the financial arrangements between Volney and himself. You see, Mathison had invented and patented the meter. He wouldn’t sell the rights to him, only give Dad a percentage and sell him the meters at a discount.
While we were in Camden New Jersey Dad decided to put out his own version of the E-meter for $79.50. I don’t know why but the project had barely gotten underway when suddenly we weren’t selling E-meters anymore; maybe Volney got mad. Soon after, Dad pronounced the “E-meter” obsolete because of newly discovered advanced techniques that didn’t require the E-meter anymore. According to Dad the techniques were far superior than anything he had created before (which was a routine statement for him).
Naturally our members had to come in for additional training to keep up to date; We did our best to refer people to and recommend only those auditors who had the latest Scientology techniques to apply. We wanted only the best for our fellow man.
Several months went by before Dad had another go at E-meters: We had become a religion by then and moved to Washington D.C. He had two Scientologists versed in electronics create a smaller battery powered model. It cost, I believe, $79.50 retail and it operated pretty much the same. The apparent main difference was that instead of only offering it in black as Mathison had, we could give a choice of red or blue paint finish. (Dad and I used the blue model.)
I’ve never known very much about electronics but their newest model seems to me to do the same as the old ones. Even though they seem to be more sensitive and sophisticated. It now costs $136.00 (net to members) probably due to the fancier case surrounding it.
Since the Food and Drug Administration was a little upset about the meter allegedly being used for diagnostic purposes. It is now a confessional aid and persons buying them sign a statement delineating its purpose and use: It’s still the E-meter.
I must admit that I wasn’t surprised at all when I learned that according to the U.S. National Bureau of Standards the present E-meter is next to worthless. After all, I had been around the gadgets a long time.
The E-meter wasn’t the only thing that didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Scientology was supposed to make you free and happy, yet I have seen it cause physical, emotional, and especially financial deterioration stemming partially from a lack of sleep, which is sometimes enforced on Scientologists as punishment, e.g. 24 hours without sleep for a certain offense. (And yet their literature talks of sleeping well, eating, etc!) Physical neglect also comes from the tremendous pressure of their courses and the time they spend on Scientology. The “Sea Org” personnel, or the people who stay with my father on the Apollo as his guard and crew, (Dad also uses them to enforce his policies within his many world wide organizations.) work a routine 14.5 hours a day and are expected to work longer if necessary for $40 a week or less at times; even though their expenses are reportedly paid. Their low pay scale and the amount of money that goes to Scientology may also cut into their food budget. Neglect of the body was also a natural if unintentional result of one of Scientology’s many goals which in effect strives to reduce the physical body and environment to a zero level and to expand the spirit towards infinity. it’s easy to forget to feed a body when you’re trying to feed a spirit.
As for emotional deterioration, this has always been a very sore point with Scientologists. They insist that Scientology has never caused anyone to crack up, which may be true. But it would be futile for them to deny that people have not gone off the deep end while undergoing Scientology auditing. (Of course the same is true for people undergoing psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, etc.) To give just one recent example, there is a wonderful and fascinating new book called “Inside Scientology”: which gives the reader an excellent idea of why people would join Scientology and what really goes on in there. Robert Kaufman, the author describes secret Scientology auditing with the E-meter including one level in which he was supposed to get rid of the spirits (called “thetans”) which were supposedly running amok through his body. While undergoing this ordeal, which he describes in frightening detail, he ended up in a mental institution for a short while.
When I was in Scientology, I also occasionally saw people who seemed to just go nuts during their auditing or training sessions and would run out of the centers screaming wildly. We would always bring them back to the “org” as the Scientology organization is called, and make them continue on because we believed that the road out was the road through. (That meant that the process that got the person into the difficulties had to be used to get them out of it.)
During one of the many advanced Clinical Courses (A.C.C.) I taught in Washington D.C. a student fought his way out of the school and ran the several blocks to his apartment, yelling “Help police” all the way. By the time I arrived he had locked himself in. I weighed 250 pounds at the time and it was fairly easy to break the door down with a healthy kick. He tried to jump out his second story window but I was able to collar him and drag him back to class. Needless to say, he finished the course, as many before and after did. Out of the hundreds of students I personally trained only a few “blew” or “rabbited” a course: Just enough to add a little spice to a sometimes dull and routine day.
I’ll admit a few of those people were psycho to begin with: We tried to screen most of them out because they were more trouble than they were worth.
Why fool around with a bunch of nuts when it was so easy to recruit normal people. But being human, discrepancies between what Scientology actually practiced and what they preached crept in occasionally. My father always claimed not to take in psychotics, people who had undergone shock treatments, or had been institutionalized. But he did take some in, and claimed he was just doing it for “research.”
Because of the vast volume of his writings some of his research into psychotics found its way into print and distributed to his followers for their use: “Handling the Psychotic” in the “Dianetic Auditors Bulletin” (D.A.B.) December 1950 and in 1953 he included a specific step in how to audit psychotics in “Standard Operating Procedure S” (S.O.P. S). Namely “Step VII-Psychotic Cases (Whether in or out of the body)” to further quote, “The psychotic appears to be in such desperate straits that the auditor often errs in thinking desperate measures are necessary. Use the lightest possible methods — Do not run engrams — If he has been given electric shock, do not process it or any other brutality. Work him for very brief periods, for his attention span is short. Always work psychotics with another auditor or a companion present.” (From issue 16-G, page 4 of the magazine “Scientology.”)
Dad has always tried to find faster ways to “run out charge” and to reach the goal of Clear with greater rapidity. In mid 1952 he began experimenting with what he tentatively called a “Theta Clearing Suit,” which he hoped would drain off the “excessive charge” in the bank (part of the mind). The suit was made up of several tin cans, (here comes super soup again!) connected to copper screening; all attached to an iron pipe in the ground by wires. The cans were placed in direct contact with the neck, hands and Knees with the screen on his bare feet.
Word somehow leaked out that Dad was working on a suit which would bring high speed and effortless Clearing. The rumors spread like wildfire and became very persistent. Figures for its cost ranged as high as $5,000 were thrown around.
During the height of this talk there appeared in our Phoenix Org, a man who claimed he was a Scientologist from the midwest. He was about 35 admitted that the had had dozens and dozens of shock treatments and had been institutionalized twice over an extended period of time. That he was obviously very disturbed was apparent at the Org for he went into psychotic rages and broke things and attacked the others. Worse still, he found out where we lived and came out to our house one night and pounded on the door like Atilla the Hun. This gave us the chance to put the “Theta Clear Suit” to the test. We wrapped him in the cooper and cans to get the charge off of him, which may have been as sick as he was, but it was experimental after all. It took a lot of convincing but we managed to quiet him down — for a while. He escaped out of the bedroom window in the middle of the night. The last sight we had of him was as a dark figure running across the moonlit desert trailing his “Theta Clearing Suit” behind him.
Dad gave up the idea as having very debatable value. By the way, we were only out $3.00 in materials and we did get one psycho to leave town.
Another young girl who was processed in the Phoenix, Arizona group also began to crack up and live in one of the past lives that the E-meter convinced her she had had. She sat around in a yoga position facing the wall, being one with God all day while speaking absolute gibberish that sounded like Martian language. Things weren’t so bad when she was like that, but she was also in the habit of stripping her clothes off and running out into the street at night to find God when she felt she was losing contact with him.
We moved her under guard into a small house in the desert but one night she whacked her keeper over the head and went running through the desert naked. We mobilized about 10 of us to find her, and we told the Deputy Sheriffs who had responded to the call of a rancher who had seen her running naked through his ranch, that I was Dr. Hubbard and that we would return her to our “hospital” in Phoenix. We called her parents, who were Scientologists and told them that the reason she had gone off the deep end was that she hadn’t run the Scientology processes carefully and to take her home — fast! Which they did.
When someone cracks up today, they don’t use the term “psycho,” “emotionally disturbed” or any of its well known euphemisms. In keeping with my father’s practice of inventing new words (Scientologists have had to publish a dictionary to explain all of them), they call them “P.T.S.III” which means Potential Trouble Sources, Third Level. Like the girl in Phoenix, they’re still watched so that they don’t harm themselves, and also so they won’t harm Scientology. Scientologists still don’t want to give people ideas that they take in emotionally disturbed people or that people ever have any emotional problems while taking their courses. But if the first happens and somebody disturbed gets in they always say that they didn’t know about their background before they joined Scientology, and if the second occurs and someone behaves bizarrely “on course,” they say that some other “third party” than Scientology led to their crackup.
In fact my father loves to create new words so much that in 1952 he bestowed the honorary certificate of “Fellowship of Scientology” on Count Alfred Korzybski for his development of General Semantics.
The financial deterioration caused by Scientology is legendary. I recently saw a price list from the Los Angeles Organization which showed that it cost at least $8,000 to reach the top levels. And that fee did not include a lot of extras that they have to pay for. I also recently heard of someone in England who spent $90,000 on Scientology, but the most I ever saw anyone spend in one lump sum was $25,000. For that price, we guaranteed him that he would go all the way to the top and become what’s called an Operating Thetan. He never made it, even after hundreds of hours of auditing by four people plus myself. I don’t know why he ever wanted to. He was just a pleasant fellow, bored with life and I don’t think there was anything really wrong with him. It’s just that he had too much money and didn’t know what to do with it. We took care of that.
In the old days, whenever Dad wanted to make some more money (as if he didn’t have enough from the courses, books, E-meters, extra training, etc.) he used to set up special Scientology “congresses.” He would make these Congresses a corporation or separate unit which would hire him for a lecture fee of up to $5,000 for a few hours of work plus expenses. The Congresses cost from $35 single to $75 per couple depending on discount, and in one three day weekend alone, he made $100,000. I received about $400 for my work during those three days, which was the largest payment received by anyone other than Dad.
Money was always important to my father. While now I think he’s in Scientology for many other reasons too, in those days I believe he was in it mostly for the money and power it gave him. He was obsessed with cash and never used credit cards to my knowledge or put his money in banks (where it could be attached) except where it was absolutely necessary for business. He always kept enough cash on him personally so that he could walk out of an office, get into a taxi and go off anyplace. He also kept a lot of money around the house and I found a shoebox once which was filled with ’20’s and ’50’s and I counted up $25,000. (I put it all back Dad.) Today he’s rumored to have 23 million dollars but I think a more accurate figure would be about 7 million.
Scientologists all believe that this money came from his writings in the days before Dianetics, and they often boast that Dad was a prolific and successful writer in those days, although I think most of them are understandably uncomfortable that Dad’s science was first presented to the general public in a science fiction magazine. They are right that Dad did make some money before Dianetics, but it was hardly anything remotely resembling his alleged accumulated wealth today.
Furthermore, as I said earlier, in those early days, Dad was not the kind to stash his money away in banks and save it. He would spend it as fast as he got it. Scientologists also believe that whatever money Dad has made on Dianetics and Scientology (generally 10 percent from each group) he would put back in for research. Dad has even stated that Scientology owes him money from his own cash that he says he’s put into it. (Where did he get that from?) But I never saw him do any extensive or expensive research during the 10 years that Scientology and Dianetics were really being formulated and “researched.” The main “testing” I saw him do was on his family, and he certainly didn’t pay us for that.
But I don’t think it’s the money that keeps him in Scientology now. He is totally dedicated to his stated goals. I think he completely believes in himself, what he’s doing, and where he’s going. I also don’t think he lets anything get in the way of what he wants. He has always done things his own way because Dad has always recognized only one law: His own. (He was tremendously impressed with Aleister Crowley, the English mystic who wrote “Do as thou will: that is the whole of the law.”) That he does as he wants was obvious way back when he wanted to get married to his second wife but was still married to his first. He did it anyway.
I think that my father is very happy on his converted cattle boat in the Mediterranean where he is surrounded by fawning Scientologists. He has always loved sailing and ships and has given himself the title of “Commodore” of his fleet. Furthermore, like most of us, he’s always like being adulated and he has thousands and thousands of people in this world literally worshipping him. (I doubt if Scientology has the millions and millions of members they claim, for Dad has always given figures about membership which were much higher than they really were.) He believes that he is saving the world, and Dad has written, and I know he truly believes, that he, ie Scientology has the answer to everything and anything in life.
In order to believe that, he has had to close his eyes to many negative things that have happened which made it apparent that Scientology is not always so effective, and sometimes negatively effective on the person. He has explained it away by saying that anything negative happening in Scientology was someone else’s fault, while of course anything positive he attributed to himself. I personally have never heard him admit he’s wrong or apologized for any action. Instead, he would attribute disasters to two things. The first was bad or incomplete auditing, in other words, it was the fault of others who were unable to “duplicate” his processes carefully and fully. But suppose they were duplicating “Standard Tech” exactly and it wasn’t working or people were having very bad reactions? Then Dad would say that there was a third party responsible for the difficulties. This outside agent might be the general environment, but usually it was another person who had something to do with the one having difficulty. But it was never ever L. Ron Hubbard.
The effect of blaming things on others has led to one of the most disconcerting and deplorable aspects of Scientology which has been criticized by some foreign governments: the way Scientology breaks up families. Of course some of these breakups come about unintentionally. Scientology takes the person away from the real world and creates a new one for him, so naturally people break some of their old-world ties. This happens first by breaking down their communication (although Scientology claims to teach people to communicate better) since Scientologists have their own words and their own use of them, which only another Scientologist can understand. Since Scientology takes up so much of their time, they lose common interests with their non-Scientological friends, husbands, wives, parents and children. The only subject they seem to care about is Scientology, and since much of Scientology is secret, they can only discuss things which are important to them with other Scientologists. They are also forever proselytizing, which alienates those around them who don’t care to join Scientology. Scientology also leads maybe inadvertently to blaming others rather than yourself which can also cause strain and could possibly cause them to “mock-up” (imagine) enemies where none really exist.
It is obvious how this can lead to divorces even though that may not be the intention. When one partner no longer has anything in common with the other, he gets rid of his non-Scientological partner and marries a Scientologist. Actually, many of these Scientology marriages didn’t work out well either, for while in the beginning it may have gone well after a while, it became dull for those people to just sit around and discuss Scientology all the time. That Scientology comes before all other matters can also cause friction between two people. It’s bad enough when a woman says she has a headache, but when a wife says to her husband, “I can’t have sex tonight because I’m running Level OT IV,” he may become understandably antagonistic toward Scientology — and her.
To digress for a moment, there was always a very open view of sexual behavior at the centers and anything went with virtually anybody. It’s true that we weren’t supposed to have sex because of our “codes,” but we sure as hell did. Some of this happened because of the proximity and rapport brought about by the auditing sessions. People discuss(ed) very intimate things, and I’ve seen women during sessions have orgasms, even multiple ones, and I’ve watched them take their clothes off and even try to rape me. To be quite honest I didn’t always fight it. Some other of the auditors also succumbed to the same temptations; perhaps because underneath it all, they were human. Psychological transference in Scientology was neither recognized nor cautioned against.
To return to the problem of the breaking up of families, and friendships I might add: While some of it was the unintentional result of the Scientology world and its philosophy, what was and is frightening is that some of it was and is intentional. Since Scientologists believe that a third party is often responsible for Scientology not working, they are made to “disconnect” from that party, that is, totally break off and not speak to what they call the “suppressive” third party. It may be a husband, mother, even a young child, but the Scientologist is not permitted to have anything to do with him/her regardless.
This has been carried one dangerous step further. People may be “suppressive” to a Scientologist if they say something against Scientology or try to dissuade the Scientologist from his “obsession” (Scientology). Say a parent tries to tell his child that the only way his auditing will work is if he “disconnects” from his parents. This not only breaks up the family but may bring the child more into Scientology since he has no other family.
All these things and more caused me to become disenchanted with Scientology but at first I tried to close my eyes to it.
In the beginning Dad had said the source of Scientology included many people, past and present. At least 40 people I know of: ranging from Anaxagoras to me. As time went on he became its single source and started saying it always had been that way: Scientology was for everyone. Where were our share of the ethnic and minority groups? If Scientology was supposed to create freedom and mutual affinity, why then did I have to cancel the certificates of my friends or suddenly not talk to a life long buddy? And why this growing preoccupation with fifth columns and enemies? I started asking these questions and I wasn’t getting any answers; not even from myself.
I knew a Scientologist didn’t have a conscience in the normal sense but somewhere along the way I seemed to have acquired one. I was getting just a little tired of having “conversations” with people, tearing off in the middle of the night with our mailing lists and records to keep them out of the hands of the government, moving from state to state: Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona again, Washington D.C., London, England (5 times) and being involved in corporations like they were coming out of the popcorn machine. And too, I suppose, I was getting a little weary of living and promoting someone elses life and dreams: My fathers.
But I guess old habits are hard to break. No matter what I witnessed, I still, in the final analysis at the time, felt that my father could do no wrong, and when I saw things I didn’t like, I believed that he and Scientology were not responsible. To be quite honest, another reason I stayed was the money. No matter what the problems were, I closed my eyes to them for toward the end I was making a great deal of money: More importantly, I had the love and respect of thousands of people. I didn’t want to get out of a good thing. During many of the later years in Scientology, I made many many times more than the original $50 a week. I’ll admit I charged more for auditing simply because I was L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.
Suddenly my salary was drastically reduced when Dad changed over to a unit system, each unit was supposed to be worth $1.00. One good week I collected my normal 175 units but since he only paid 10 cents per unit I didn’t even make $20 that week. (This low pay scale for members is also a current policy.) The only way I could really earn money was to do outside auditing. But Dad forbid me to do that, which I resented, since he had done it in earlier days himself and routinely charged $500 an hour. He gave one famous American actress 25 hours of auditing and charged her $5,000 in advance for it, which means he got $200 an hour from her. (He gave her a discount.)
Then too, the game was getting a little too serious and possibly deadly, which worried me.
During the December Congress of 1954 in Phoenix Arizona, Dad fired a pistol into the stage floor while in the middle of a lecture to the delegates. After everyone had calmed down he said he was reserving this “auditing process R2-45 for psychiatrists.” We had created “R2-45” in jest several months before as the quickest method to “exteriorize” someone. A one shot clear so to speak (shooting someone in the head with a Colt pistol); that is, to get them (the thetan) to leave their body. Getting someone “exteriorized” was an integral part of the clearing process.
When he came off the stage I said to him, “Hey, that was a great stunt.” He really startled me when he said it wasn’t a stunt; he meant it!
I don’t personally know of anyone, including psychiatrists, that R2-45 was used on, but in 1968 he put out a bulletin titled “Racket Exposed.” The bulletin listed 13 people whom he had personally declared “suppressive.” He alleged that 13 Scientologists had stolen “Upper Level Materials which were of a research nature and not for distribution.” Among the instructions and orders spelled out above his signature was #7: “Any Sea Organization member contacting any of them is to use Auditing Process R2-45.” The fate of the 13 is unknown to me at least.
As a fun game in 1952 Dad and I, with our staff of Ben Foot, plugged an ohm meter into a large tree; I darned near beat the tree to death with a baseball bat to see if we could create engrams.
Ben recorded on his little chart the readings after each blow. That silly old tree wouldn’t go unconscious or even show much difference on the meter. We went back to more serious matters.
Later in 1959 when Dad had recently purchased Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex England (which is now Scientology’s English headquarters) I walked into the green house. Dad had an E-meter attached to a large plant. When I asked him jokingly, “Do you want me to get a baseball bat?” He became angry and replied, “You threw it out of session! I almost had it exteriorized. Get out of here.” I left very quietly.
Up to 1954 all a guy had to do was to come in to one of our training schools, pay $500, get the training, go home and do as he pleased when it came to auditing and even training in his area.
The Advanced Clinical Course upped the price to $800 then a short time later Dad required 10 percent of the field auditors gross be sent to him.
Suddenly in order for a field auditor to obtain the right to train and audit he needed a “franchise” from us (currently called “missions”).
At one point in 1955 we charged a $5,000 fee to allow someone to teach the “Bachelor of Scientology” course in his hometown and a $25,000 fee for them to teach our “Doctor of Scientology” course. He had to pay on top of that, 10 percent of his gross. Which they still do, world wide.
Recently it has been reported that among other conditions and fees, the auditor must buy at least $5,000 worth of books to stock his “Scientology Center” and place in his local book store.
The World of the Totally Free was getting expensive.
There had also been increasing resentment building up toward Mary Sue, and I believe that she felt the same way toward me as well. I’ll admit I may have been jealous of her because she was close to my father. But I felt that it was she who turned against me and my sister Katy (who is now a Scientologist but fairly inactive) once she gave birth to her own child with my father. I may be wrong, but I felt that once she started building her own family and realized what a good thing Scientology was in terms of power and money, she saw us as a threat to her own children’s inheritance.
Money was the cause of many of Mary Sue and my problems. She was the head of accounting which meant I had to go to her for money. She was supposed to take care of certain payments as part of my salary and she sometimes forgot. She almost caused me to lose my car because she didn’t keep up the payments for it. This all reached a head when I had to make a trip to England on Scientology business for 16 weeks. Although Mary Sue was supposed to take care of financial matters for my wife and children while I was gone, she didn’t send them any money and they were broke. When I returned and asked her about it, she said that she had forgotten.
There was also a growing though mild resentment toward my father. Although my loyalty and respect for him never wavered, I resented his being rougher on me than on his other employees. Since I was his number one son, he expected me to be the best in administration, conduct and results. I felt that I was under constant pressure which I didn’t deserve, for the inferiority complex I had as a child turned into delusions of grandeur while I worked with my father. I honestly believed that I was better than the other people working in Scientology because I was the son of L. Ron Hubbard. What made it harder for me was that Dad and I had great rapport on a person to person basis and when we were alone together, we would drink rum and talk about anything and everything. But when other people were around, he treated me like one of the troops, and I didn’t like being publicly treated like a dumb little slob working in the basement like the others when I was L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.
Once I began to realize that my father was no longer a God, I could assess his creation more realistically. One of the things about Scientology that really disenchanted me was that Dad was constantly claiming to be refining and improving his techniques. He would claim just about every six months that he had just made a “fantastic new discovery” which I saw was no better than the old — and not really new. It just had a different name, and maybe a new twist here and there. In changing things he never admitted that the old way had been wrong, just that the new was better. I wasn’t unhappy that these “new discoveries” cost people a lot of money (since they had to retake the same courses when done “differently”) for it effected my own pocket and made me more money as well, plus it gave me more students to teach. But I was unhappy watching people spend money on “new” and “infinitely better” techniques which didn’t get observable and demonstrable results.
I kept watching his six-month cycle of new discoveries again and again, (now it’s been shortened and seems to happen about every three months) and I saw that nothing new really happened and that it was almost the same old Scientology. It was discouraging to watch people use these “different” techniques and have cognitions like a flashbulb and then go black again. One day they would say “I see the Universe,” but the next day they were back to the same old slob again.
Scientology was like food for them and they needed their auditing three times a day. But the results, if there were any, seemed to quickly empty out of their system. Even if they did honestly come to some insight about the cause of their problems, that conclusion often seemed absurd to me. I watched many of them blame their ancient past lives for their present troubles, instead of looking in the mirror and saying “there it is buddy.”
In 1950 Dianetics was said by Dad to cure almost anything since as he has stated; 80 percent of mans ills are psycho-somatic.
It is natural, I suppose that any new “discovery” which has been turned into a “science” tends to wax enthusiastic.
After the A.M.A. became disturbed by Dianetic’s intrusion into their exclusive domain; Dianetics had to tone it down a bit.
The advent of Scientology gave us the exit we needed.
In various and subtle ways the statement was made that, and I paraphrase: “Scientology addresses only the spirit of man and if, perchance while we are addressing that spirit, certain physical ills or body abberrations disappear or we alleviate them it was ONLY a side benefit or an additional, but unexpected, result of auditing. But was not the purpose of the auditing nor was any particular attention paid to the illness, disease or deformity.”
In 1952 (after the science became Scientology) in an article titled, “The Handling of Arthritis” Dad says, in part: “The disability commonly called arthritis is actually a chronic somatic of the depository type. — The complete and entire reduction of arthritis, so as to inhibit its return at any time in the future, depends on the running of electronic incidents by Technique 80, in particular its famous black and white process. — Of all the ills of man which can be successfully processed by Scientology, arthritis ranks near the top. In skilled hands, this ailment, though misunderstood and dreaded in the past, already has begun to become history. Twenty-five hours of Scientology by an auditor who fairly understands how to process arthritis can be said to produce an invariable alleviation of the condition. Some cases, even severe ones, have responded in as little as two hours of processing, according to reports from auditors in the field.”
In 1953 in “The Old Mans Case Book” by L. Ron Hubbard. (“The following material is an extract from the case-books of Dr. Hubbard or advice he has given in letters or personally to auditors concerning the running of cases.”)
In answering a telephone inquiry by a “Hubbard Professional Auditor” who was having a little trouble in auditing an 18 month old baby with leukemia (the medical doctors had only given the child a week to live) Dad replies: “Leukaemia (sic) is evidently psycho-somatic in origin and at least eight cases of leukaemia had been treated successfully by Dianetics after medicine had traditionally given up. The source of leukaemia has been reported to be an engram containing the phrase ‘it turns my blood to water’.”
After explaining several auditing techniques that the auditor could use on the baby he concluded the article saying; “I have been informed that it has worked on babies as young as four months. In working babies I normally use the first three steps given above.”
Part of the creed of the “Church of American Science” as contained in the original incorporation papers states; “That the human spirit is the only truly effective therapeutic agent available.”
I guess dear ‘ol Dad believes the saying “When there is a will there is a way.” But poor Count Alfred must be turning in his grave.
In England during 1972 it was reported that the Church of Scientology was now an “Esoteric Church aimed at developing the thetan and with no interest in medical health, psychoanalysis or psychiatry.”
I wonder what Dad means by esoteric? Will he spell it c-u-r-e or t-h-e-r-a-p-e-u-t-i-c or maybe z-i-m-q-u-a-r-t?
I seem to hear an old refrain: A rose by any other name –, well maybe I’m wrong; After all, I’m no longer clear and my ears could be playing tricks on me.
Well, with my eyes slowly opening and the fact that Dad was away I fell prey to a Scientology illness called an “Attack of Elsewhereness.” (To put that in Websters terms; remove thy body and spirit from its present location at E-MC2 speed.)
Mostly because of these multiple and complex factors coupled with my problems with Mary Sue, and my growing disenchantment with Scientology; on November 23, 1959, I walked out of the Washington D.C. Organization without telling anyone about it. Dad was in Melbourne, Australia, and through their telex communications, probably heard about it the next day. Yet he didn’t try to get me back or write me one word then. Instead, there was silence for a few months. Then I began getting the most incredible communications such as the one I am looking at right now, saying “NIBS THE FOUNDING CHURCH IS ISSUING WARRANT FOR YOUR ARREST…YOU HAD BETTER GET A LAWYER QUICK. DR. HUBBARD.”
I continued to do private auditing in and around the Los Angeles and Chicago areas on a full time basis from 1959 until 1962 since it was the only way I knew how to make money. I still believed that some things in Scientology had some validity. It HAD to have some validity: I had devoted a goodly portion of my life to bringing Total Freedom to the “Wog” world. (A Wog is anyone who isn’t a Scientologist.)
I still believed in past lives and the E-meter. In fact, someone I was auditing in those years convinced me that he had once been an Inca Priest who had buried some treasure in New Mexico. I went with him on two expeditions to the mountains there, and using an E-meter, we looked for this treasure. We never found it.
As I banged and bumped around this strange and grubby REAL world a dawning awareness came upon me that in fact Scientology was based on a very shaky pyramid. It rests on three parts, and since those are wrong, the rest of the structure is shaky.
Part of the pyramid base is my father’s theories about the cause of our problems, the existence of past lives, etc. Unfortunately, many seem to come from his imagination and not from facts. I remember when I was 7 to 10 years old, Dad used to tell Katy and I long bedtime stories which he obviously made up on the spur of the moment. These same stories with little variation later emerged in various books and writings of his as facts about our past lives or present situations.
Even when Dad was trying to present facts, not bedtime stories, it was often obviously fantasy. He wrote a book called “The History of Man” which I helped him on. Although the book claimed to contain historical facts about man’s beginnings (and his past lives), Dad did no book research whatsoever that I remember. He just wrote the book off the top of his head as he had done in his earlier science fiction and other stories. One bit of “research” I observed him doing was to hold on to the E-meter cans himself, ask if a certain incident had happened, and if the E-meter responded, he would say that it had been a real incident in all of our past lives and included it in the book.
Furthermore, the whole book was written in 2 or 3 weeks, which is like writing “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” in a month. And I was on Benzedrine during that time, which had been prescribed, among other medicines, by Dr. Winter, an M.D. for my father and who also wrote the forward to “Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health.” I actually took the bennies (“uppers” they’re called now) without my father’s knowledge, but it is curious that neither he nor the E-meter (which he says “reads” everything) could detect this “withhold” or state. The bennies made the incidents I “remembered” more weird which pleased my father, and it makes me laugh that now it seems thousands of Scientologists are “running out” my old bennie trips for me.
The second foundation of the pyramid which is shaky is the E-meter. Evidence presented at the Food and Drug Administration Association’s case against Scientology’s E-meter (they had confiscated the meter for being misbranded) showed that it was just a simple Wheatstone Bridge whose behavior was erratic which made it an impractical tool. Some Scientologists even admit that they can “beat the meter” just by the way they squeeze the cans.
The final part of the pyramid is the Scientology auditing. The goal of this auditing is certainly admirable for it strives to achieve things people have hungered for thousands of years such as; freedom of the individual, greater ability to handle the environment, true and permanent self realization and more. But as I look back objectively, I never saw much of this come about through Dianetic or Scientology auditing.
During this same period my father personally “cleared” me. To be audited by L. Ron Hubbard was a rare occurrence: To be “cleared” by him was one of the greatest honors any Scientologist could receive. The only problem was it wasn’t permanent; the state of clear I mean. In fact, he personally “cleared” me a total of three times from 1952 to 1958. With all three times I never thought of myself as being “clear” (according to his current definition at the time). But when Dad himself AND his E-meter said I was Clear: It must have been so. Who was I to disagree?
Pardon me while I put my old threadbare reverse collar on and speak as a Scientologist again. I’ll explain what I mean by “Clear.”
THETA is Nothingness (a noun). It is not a product of this universe or as we would say the MEST (matter, energy, space and time) universe. It in fact created the MEST universe. Theta wasn’t created; it decided to BE. Theta has no position in time or space but by postulate (decision) can assume or take up a position in time and/or space. Theta is not life and energy, it creates it.
A THETAN is Theta that has assumed a position in time and space, that is, a Viewpoint. Which, by the way, is the only basic difference between individuals.
The Scientology term THETAN designates the beingness of the individual human being; the awareness of awareness unit. The “I”; the human mind; that quality and identity which IS the person. In Scientology a person doesn’t have a soul, he IS the soul. One does not speak of “my thetan” or “my soul” anymore than he would speak of “my me.”
By the time Theta has “experienced” 74 or more trillion years of theta wars; building the MEST universe; creating galactic space opera empires; being trapped and in turn trapping each other in vast and Rube Goldberg style electronic machines; and being reincarnated several thousands of times; he, the thetan, finds himself at this juncture in time, an effect of his own cause. He is “stuck” in the head of a human body. An individual Thetan is generally found now days in the center of the skull. The Thetan is conceived to be small but is as large as the person believes it to be.
In “clearing” an individual, an attempt is made by auditing to return him to Cause point (like he was originally) before he took his 74 trillion year old roller coaster ride. To be “clear” or as Scientology now sometimes calls it “Operating Thetan” (a state above “clear”) means in simple terms he doesn’t now have all the incidents and junk he has acquired hanging about his neck like a Millstone anymore. (That’s a new term I’ve invented for Scientology’s term: BANK. They both mean the same thing.) Supposedly, when one is clear he has realized the full potential of Theta. Total knowingness (able to know anything). Total awareness (perceive anything). Total power (create and control anything). And last but not least total Freedom to BE; Do; Have; ANYTHING.
Two statements by Dad might help to further clarify Clear: “The greatest God you will ever know is You” and “The only real aberration is denial of self.” Enough said?
I would say that Scientology today has peaked and is now on the wane. I believe that one cause of this is the way my father has been running the show. Years ago, when he was confronted with difficulties, he solved it simply and directly by tackling the specific problem that was bothering him. Now he’s like a hunter who goes into the woods and sprays bullets around and hopes that he will hit something. Often he hits the wrong thing and it comes back to haunt and hound him. For example, one of Scientology’s shameful policies has been to sue any book or newspaper that prints anything about it unless Scientology has complete editorial control, or to try to injunct books before publication if they don’t present Scientology in a favorable light.
For instance, George Malko and his excellent and objective book: Scientology; The Now Religion (Delacourt Press, New York) was sued for millions of dollars for simply reporting in an honest and truthful manner what he discovered when he investigated the subject of Scientology.
Paulette Cooper author of the “Scandal of Scientology” (Tower Press, New York) was hit with reportedly four lawsuits because she dared to lift the veil of secrecy and mystery that shrouded Scientology.
Cyril Vosper, after 14 years of being deeply involved in the English Scientology Orgs finally threw in the towel and walked out almost in the same manner I did. He has written his own illuminating and candid book; The Mind Benders (Neville Spearman Ltd., London). He has been sued: For what? For telling the truth.
According to Scientology Theta is truth; Theta is indestructible; Theta needs no defense or protection; Theta is total freedom. I guess there must be a “misunderstood on the line” as Scientology would put it. I might have missed a re-definition or refinement of a word or two as it whizzed by. But, only being human, I personally can’t equate Dad’s actions and his statements.
This fight to defend something that supposedly needs no defense, besides giving the Scientologists enormous legal bills in several countries has naturally publicized the very books and people that the Scientologists don’t want people to read! They have also turned the press against Scientology, so the newspapers have been more likely to print articles or to give more space to those who make Scientology look bad (according to Scientology) rather than accepting the type of stories the Scientologists would like to see about their struggling Church and the good deeds they claim to be doing. It’s a vicious cycle, for the Scientologists feel harassed by the negative stories, lash out and sue, and as a result, get more bad publicity (on their suits), and more bad stories about them. Furthermore, their suits are causing others to sue them now, which the papers are joyfully covering.
By the end of three years of private auditing, I had totally had it with Scientology. I had hesitated to make that final break and stop privately auditing people because I had been making good money. Besides which, there was nothing else I was trained to do. From the age of 18 to 28, I had only worked on Scientology. When I first became disenchanted, I knew I could leave Scientology entirely and start at the bottom at some other job, but I had become used to being important as L. Ron Hubbard’s son. So no matter how bad things got, I had to keep up the game.
But from the day I finally decided I had had enough, I did no more auditing and didn’t touch another damned E-meter again. Well, that’s not entirely true. I helped the Justice Department in their tax case against Scientology, and the FDA in their E-meter case, and showed them how to work the machine. Some of their agents had spent so much time infiltrating Scientology they could run it better than I could! They also had the best total library of Dianetics and Scientology I’ve ever seen — much better than my fathers. Apparently, they had spent a good deal of time “in Scientology” because I saw two ardent Scientologists and past students of mine over there. When I said to the agents “oh great, you’ve got them to testify for you,” they laughed and told me that the “students” were agents in Scientology right along.
Anyway, I’m glad I left. I finally accepted not being the star and prince. I started out someplace new and got a job selling household goods door to door at one-tenth of my Scientology income. Despite all the money my father’s rumored to have in Swiss bank accounts, none of it tempts me at all. I believe that the money comes from the broken minds and bodies of people, and feeling that way, how could I ever enjoy spending it?
My father was and is a brilliant, imaginative and enormously creative man. It makes me sad to think that if he had only used these qualities in the right way, a lot of people in this world would have been much happier today; living their own life, dreaming their own dreams and being totally free in their own way.
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Chris Shelton on Scientology justice
Says Chris: “This week, an attorney and I dissect Scientology’s system of ethics and justice, looking at its similarities and differences to the military justice code and our Common Law-based legal system. Most important, we describe exactly how Hubbard’s system all but ensures that Scientologists will experience nothing but injustice.”
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Scientology’s celebrities and ‘Ideal Orgs’ — now with comments!
We’re building landing pages about David Miscavige’s favorite playthings, including celebrities and ‘Ideal Orgs.’ We’re hoping you’ll join in and help us gather as much information as we can about them, in order to build a record and maintain a watch as Scientology continues its inexorable decline — and yes, we finally have comments working on these new pages! Head on over and help us with links and photos and comments.
Scientology’s celebrities, from A to Z! Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!
Scientology’s ‘Ideal Orgs,’ from one end of the planet to the other! Help us build up pages about each these worldwide locations!
Today’s Ideal Org: Salt Lake City, Utah!
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Now on sale: Twice the Miss Lovely!
Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. What a pleasure it is for us to work with her on this after we wrote about her ordeal as a victim of Scientology’s “Fair Game” campaigns in our 2015 book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, which is also on sale in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions.
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THE WHOLE TRACK
[ONE year ago] EXCLUSIVE: DA’s office asked Leah Remini not to air episode about Danny Masterson
[TWO years ago] Scientology strikes back at Leah Remini as publicity for her upcoming series explodes
[THREE years ago] Ten years ago, ‘South Park’ rocked Scientology in a way it’s never recovered from
[FOUR years ago] Dani Lemberger, who led a breakaway Israel mission, sues Scientology for libel and fraud
[FIVE years ago] Sunday Funnies: Roslyn Cohn’s One-Woman Show Set to Skewer Scientology
[SIX years ago] Scientology’s Policy of “Disconnection”: A Mother’s Open Letter to Her Children
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Bernie Headley has not seen his daughter Stephanie in 5,257 days.
Katrina Reyes has not seen her mother Yelena in 1,890 days
Sylvia Wagner DeWall has not seen her brother Randy in 1,370 days.
Brian Sheen has not seen his grandson Leo in 433 days.
Geoff Levin has not seen his son Collin and daughter Savannah in 321 days.
Clarissa Adams has not seen her parents Walter and Irmin Huber in 1,496 days.
Carol Nyburg has not seen her daughter Nancy in 2,270 days.
Jamie Sorrentini Lugli has not seen her father Irving in 3,044 days.
Quailynn McDaniel has not seen her brother Sean in 2,390 days.
Dylan Gill has not seen his father Russell in 10,956 days.
Melissa Paris has not seen her father Jean-Francois in 6,876 days.
Valeska Paris has not seen her brother Raphael in 3,043 days.
Mirriam Francis has not seen her brother Ben in 2,624 days.
Claudio and Renata Lugli have not seen their son Flavio in 2,884 days.
Sara Goldberg has not seen her daughter Ashley in 1,924 days.
Lori Hodgson has not seen her son Jeremy and daughter Jessica in 1,636 days.
Marie Bilheimer has not seen her mother June in 1,162 days.
Joe Reaiche has not seen his daughter Alanna Masterson in 5,251 days
Derek Bloch has not seen his father Darren in 2,391 days.
Cindy Plahuta has not seen her daughter Kara in 2,711 days.
Roger Weller has not seen his daughter Alyssa in 7,567 days.
Claire Headley has not seen her mother Gen in 2,686 days.
Ramana Dienes-Browning has not seen her mother Jancis in 1,042 days.
Mike Rinder has not seen his son Benjamin and daughter Taryn in 5,344 days.
Brian Sheen has not seen his daughter Spring in 1,450 days.
Skip Young has not seen his daughters Megan and Alexis in 1,853 days.
Mary Kahn has not seen her son Sammy in 1,724 days.
Lois Reisdorf has not seen her son Craig in 1,307 days.
Phil and Willie Jones have not seen their son Mike and daughter Emily in 1,812 days.
Mary Jane Sterne has not seen her daughter Samantha in 2,056 days.
Kate Bornstein has not seen her daughter Jessica in 13,165 days.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on November 3, 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
Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…
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Join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.
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
