Xenu’s first public outing: Robert Kaufman’s stunning 1972 testament, ‘Inside Scientology’

 
Robert Kaufman, a talented Broadway piano player, ditched his life as a musician to chase ‘Clear’ and beyond in Scientology, leaving Manhattan for what was then the newly opened ‘Advanced Org’ in Edinburgh, Scotland. He came home a broken man, checked himself into a mental hospital, and then began writing about his experience in Scientology as a form of therapy. By 1969 he had a manuscript completed, but he struggled to find a publisher. Finally, after books by George Malko, Paulette Cooper, and Cyril Vosper had appeared, Kaufman’s ‘Inside Scientology’ came out in 1972, published by the prestigious literary house Olympia Press. But few saw it, and it quickly sank into obscurity. Fortunately for us, Professor Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon University hosts the entire text of the book. We chose a portion of one chapter to show you that in fact it was Kaufman, more than 45 years ago, who first revealed the secret materials of the Upper Levels, including the Xenu story in OT III. More about Kaufman at the end of the excerpt.

 
“Are you a former release?” The Third Mate sat back in her chair watching me. “There was a big read on that,” she said. I didn’t comprehend. Her enigmatic expression slowly changed into a beatific smile and the meaning of the question and read finally dawned on me.

“A former release … does that mean … I’m clear?”

She continued to gaze at me, her smile widening. She couldn’t evaluate a read for me. I had to grasp this thing myself. It was up to me to drop my uncertainty that very instant and accept the fact that I was clear.

I hesitated a long moment, not wishing to think, to add anything to the simplicity of my choice.

“Well, I’m not going to fight it,” I said feebly, and at this, my acceptance, the currents passing between Third Mate and myself filled me with such warmth that I felt drugged and weak. We rose from the auditing table simultaneously and I collapsed into her embrace.

“You’re beautiful,” I murmured.

“You’re beautiful,” she replied.

 
—-

 
I wanted to rest for a couple of days, wallow in the state of clear, see more of Edinburgh, take a bus ride to Saint Andrew’s to see the historic golf course. But the Director of Processing handed me the OT I Pack. There was to be no time out. Ron wanted the planet cleared soon, and the organization needed OTs to help things along.

Back in my room I was amazed to find the Clearing Course Instruction booklet in the OT I Pack. Since it was, if anything, over-familiar to me by now, I decided to glance through it just once, have a good dinner, and return to the AO for the OT I materials. I no longer dreaded auditing. OT I will be fun, I thought — like the words of a jingle.

The full glory of the state of clear was beginning to manifest itself. I had my choice of restaurants, and this having-to-choose was wonderful. I took off my glasses and details around me popped into focus. The sidewalk paving — I had never noticed before — had a texture, a grain to it. It was beautiful, and I was seeing it for the first time.

I must have a steak to celebrate. I drifted into a restaurant, one I’d never been to before, a comfortable dining room with tablecloths, carpet, and fireplace. The act of seating myself was slow-paced, deliberate, each movement separate and distinct, with no semi-conscious fidgeting. Whenever I wished to move a part of my body the idea transmitted itself with miraculous ease into the desired action. A Clear is At Cause over MEST — Matter, Energy, Space, Time — His Own Physical Universe. I asked the waitress for a newspaper. The front-page turmoil struck me as a mildly ludicrous, poorly-played game. Each morsel of my dinner had a separated quality, each cut of the knife was detached from the other. The strands of meat were an attractive mosaic.

I had always wanted to be like this. Now it was here, without effort, thought, desire. My Clear Speech began to take shape. Next Success Night at the Advanced Org I would tell an eager audience in the waiting room-cum-chapel about the patterns in the sidewalk, the help of the devoted Sea Org crew, and, above all, the staggering, Heaven-shaking Technology of L. Ron Hubbard.

 
—-

 
At 7 a.m. I headed down the hall to take the first Clear leak of my first Clear morning. As a straddled the toilet bowl, the state of clear vanished. Panicky, I looked around at walls and fixtures, but it wasn’t like the night before. I was trying again.

The Objects wouldn’t read. After two sessions I accepted the non-reads as the end-phenomenon of the process and, leaving OT I with a high tone-arm, went to the AOUK to attest. It was out of my hands now. I shook as I stood in Qual Office. My clear state had evaporated like a dream, and now I was to be impelled on a dizzying climb through the Upper Levels.

The Examiner sent me to Certs and Awards with no questions asked, and I took the OT II Pack home with me.

The envelope contained the familiar Clearing Course Instructions once again, supplemented by two bulletins. One, titled “Whole-Track Implants,” delineated the first ten parts of the OT II materials. Included among the fanciful headings were The Electric GPMs and The Tocky Player-Piano. The other bulletin was a warning to the auditor not to run himself on a bombing incident or on the question of his identity. Any injury done himself by violating this order would be patched up by the organization only upon payment of a $2,000 fine.

What does it take to aberrate a thetan? Thousands and thousands of volts … poured into destructive wave-lengths and thrown straight in his face. What does it take to get him into a position where he can be aberrated? Trickery, treachery, lies. — L. RON HUBBARD

The OT II materials were as thick as the Edinburgh telephone directory. In removing the platens from their envelope, I inadvertently glimpsed the words rivers, lakes, and islands. These must be some of the items. A single page preceding Part I, The Electric GPMs, provided a further note of instruction: When the word shock appears next to an item the auditor is to think or feel shock.

Ninety minutes later I stopped getting shocks and reads. The tone-arm needle was stuck high on its dial and I felt tingly from the electrical impact, but I could do no more on the process. With a fuck-it-all attitude, I went to the AO to attest to my third Upper Level in as many days — disappointed at having finished too soon to run the rest of that novel material: the lakes, the rivers, the islands, and that Tocky Player-Piano banging away through the light years of a Whole-Track implant.

I hereby sign this waiver to the effect that neither the Scientology Organization, its branches, churches and members, nor L Ron Hubbard are responsible for anything that might happen to my mind or body on OT III, The Wall of Fire.

I signed the form. Then, smiling her solemn mystical smile, the Director of Processing placed the instruction pack on my upturned palms.

OT III INSTRUCTIONS
Here you encounter body thetans, leech-souls that have affixed themselves to your body. While they are not outright malicious, you are MUCH better off without them. You get rid of them by auditing them through two incidents that occurred billions or trillions of year ago.

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First locate a body thetan and run it on Incident 1. If that doesn’t do the trick, run it on Incident 2. Do the identical with the next body thetan and the next and the next until all body thetans have left (there may be hundreds of them).

If a body thetan turns suppressive on you, audit it through Power Processing. If you are not qualified to audit Power, then go to Qual Office for review.

If you find yourself in the middle of an Incident, you must run it on yourself. Always be sure you are auditing only one body thetan at a time. You may make the mistake of starting with one and kicking in another during the running of an Incident. Another mistake would be not to notice that a body thetan has left during Incident 1 and to run it on Incident 2.

The consequences of such mistakes are severe. You may suffer from lack of sleep, contract pneumonia or die.

I blinked at the page. The instructions were written in a forceful but clumsy longhand which somehow made me think it was L. Ron Hubbard’s. Some of the words were illegible. I locked the instructions in my briefcase and headed for the AO and the Cramming Office.

I must stay in Cramming until I fully understood about body thetans. As things stood, the process was a blur in my mind. It would have been humorous if it were a science fiction tale and not something happening to me in real life.

Cramming was a small room containing several chairs, a selection of Ron’s books, and three folding tables covered with oilcloth for clay demos. There was a nominal fee for a day in Cramming — about eight dollars. I had heard that Cramming was a good place to avoid. One could send a whole day there trying unsuccessfully to get one’s questions answered.

I sat in a corner to wait for the Cramming Officer, being careful not to let others in the room spot a stray word of the OT III Instructions. Cramming that day was the jolly young woman who had given me my first review session. She had little time to spend on us, since she was also auditing and wearing the Registrar’s hat that day. After lunch break she finally got around to me. There were no offices available in which to discuss highly dangerous data, so we used a bathroom, Cramming perched on the edge of the tub, myself astride the throne.

“What don’t you understand about these instructions?” she asked.

“I can’t even begin to tell you. For one thing, it says, `First locate a body thetan.’ Now, how in hell do you locate a body thetan?”

She told me to do clay demos. I spent the rest of the afternoon at that exercise, using my body as a screen to hide the volatile material from the gaze of others. I rolled out a figure of an auditor, with a lump of clay squashed on his back to represent a body thetan. Comm-lines and labels indicated the running of an engram.

The next morning Cramming took me into the bathroom again. I asked her how I could be sure I was auditing the correct body thetan. The demos hadn’t given me a glimmer on what one said to these creatures, or on how to run the process. I began to wear her down with questions.

At last she said, “It’s not that difficult. Why don’t you go home and tackle it?” She sounded as if it were a challenging game that might be fun to try. In any case, little was being accomplished by our discussions. I signed out of Cramming and went to the Director of Processing for the OT III materials. At least I knew now one thing I hadn’t known before. I had managed to find out that body thetans were located while watching the E-meter. I was to mentally scan myself until I got a read. And at that part of my body was a leech-soul…

Few are the preclears whose bodies do not react vigorously to the suggestion that some of these incidents may exist, so violent is the charge. — L. RON HUBBARD

The two Incidents were written out in longhand. One was the bombing incident. I visualized my face, scanning it up and down in my mind’s eye while looking for read on the machine. At the area of my right eyebrow I got a read. I wrote on the worksheet “body thetan over right eye,” and directed the thing to the beginning of Incident 1.

Incident 1 occurs at the beginning of the time track — it is dated at 405 trillion years ago:

there is a snap — a chariot appears — turns right — then left — and vanishes — a cherub carrying a horn is seen — he raises it to his mouth and blows on it — he advances getting closer and closer — suddenly he whirls around and retreats — there is a volley of snaps — blackness falls on the scene.

I ran the body thetan through the Incident several times. The picture on my mental screen kept changing. On one run the chariot careened across a dusty field, on the next a grassy meadow with tapestries of flowers, and on others the horse winged through a cloudy sky, in the dark of night or full sunlight, like Pegasus. The cherub’s horn call sounded in various registers, high and low. Once it gave out a Bronx cheer, resembling a fart.

I wrote down everything on my worksheets. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was mocking the whole thing up … a cognition! The body thetan was free to leave — had indeed left already. I made a notation to that effect and located another one on my left side between the ribs. After a few Incident 1s it stopped reading. I hunted about for another but I was uneasy. Suppose the last one were still around? There had been no cognition, no unequivocal sense that it was gone. Was the body thetan playing hide-and-seek with me?

The next body thetan was just above my left eye. I ran it on Incident 1 a number of times. For a moment I suspected that I was imagining the process. However, this thought struck me as abstraction, not vivid, unmistakable cognition. Unconvinced that the creature had departed, I ran the Incident repeatedly. Needle action dwindled; the Incident must be flat by now.

A list of volcanoes was included in the materials, divided up into two columns, one for each hemisphere. I got a read when I called “Eastern Hemisphere,” went down the column and got a read on “Java.” I addressed the body thetan above my left eye — “Are you the body thetan I’ve been auditing?” — got a read, and reached for the bombing Incident.

35 billion years ago an evil prince named Xenu solved the problem of over-population on another planet by taking two billion thetans to earth which was then known as Teegeeack — very space opera — he stuffed them into hydrogen bombs which he dumped into volcanic craters and exploded — the thetans were blown up into the air attached to electric bands — then they were implanted with the bank loaded on an airplane and dropped back on earth — the worst possible disasters came to anyone who attempted to detect this plot until Ron managed to expose it — Ron nearly came to a terrible end himself but somehow survived though very whacked-out — Xenu was punished for his crime by imprisonment in an electric box which was stored inside a mountain somewhere in the western part of the North American continent where he has remained to this day — the body thetan is freed on the cognition of seeing a grinning airplane pilot saying `he’s mocking it up’ — if the body thetan isn’t gone by then there follows a thirty-day run of pictures of gods, devils and the whole bank.

I directed the body thetan to the beginning of Incident 2, checked it on the meter to see that it was still there, and told it to go through the Incident to the end.

Incident 2 didn’t run well; maybe I shouldn’t be on it, having gone on to it prematurely. After a few runs I went back to Incident 1 to make sure it was flat. It was balkier than when I’d left it before. I tried flattening a list of buttons which Ron had supplied with the instructions in case the Incidents didn’t run properly.

“Is there an effort to stop?” I called, reading from the list. “Is there an effort to avoid the Incident?”

By now I had run Incident 1 at least thirty times. The tone-arm was getting higher and my head was splitting. Several times as the chariot raced by I caught a glimpse of the driver. As he frenziedly whipped the horses forward his face swiveled towards me in a fiendish, cannibalistic grin. Once I thought I saw the pilot in his cockpit taxi-ing down the airstrip. I was concerned over the body thetan’s whereabouts; perhaps it had gone many runs ago and I had summoned it back. I called out buttons in profusion. Music was playing in my head, I noted on my worksheet. I slogged through one run after another until the meter was completely packed.

I had done 63 runs. This was impossible; no engram could require that many. Feeling ill, nauseated with what I’d been doing, I ended the session.

Early the next morning I awoke with the frights. The thought of further auditing was unbearable. Maybe the same thing that had happened on the Clearing Course was happening now, and I had overrun the process. If so, the body thetan that I had freed in the first session was the only one. I would not make the same mistake of continuing on for days past a release-point, overrunning a process and making myself sick to death.

 
—-

 
The Examiner, now, by rotation of posts, the hazel-eyed young man again, went to a filing cabinet and got out all my worksheets for clearing, OT I and OT II.

“Hmmm. You know you left I and II with a high tone-arm. Now, what does the tone-arm indicate?”

“The mass of charge supporting the needle?”

“Good. And what does leaving a Level with a high tone-arm mean?”

“That I left it with a lot of charge.”

“Fine. Now I’m not going to invalidate your Levels I and II — you’ve definitely completed them, you’ve attested to that — but I notice here at the end of Level II you also went past some non-reading items. On I also, as a matter of fact. Whatever made you do that?”

“Just stupidity, I guess.”

“OK. But you know that stupidity isn’t any kind of reason for misduplicating Ron’s instructions, it’s not a valid excuse. You’re a member of the group and you must Put In Your Postulates. What you do to your preclear affects the group. Your Ethics are Out. I’m going to have to assign you a Condition of Liability for Upper Level Out-Tech.”

It was almost a relief of sorts to have the long-dreaded punishment meted out at last. With the premonition this might occur, I had been wearing wash-pants and an old shirt for the past few days. The Examiner wrote out a Liability order and sent me to Ethics, a ravishing blond, who tied a dirty gray rag around my right upper arm and sent me to the scullery.

The Steward, a former British naval officer, handed me the scullery hat-book, a complete coverage of the post. Among the duties set forth were dishwashing and bringing up coal from the cellar bin to stoke the oven fire. The hat-book went into maddening detail, including a diagram of the tiny scullery and a directive about the correct detergent to use.

 
The AOUK as a unit was in Condition of Normal Operation that day, so my shift was to last only twelve hours. I washed dishes, set the Sea Org table, scoured pots and pans, toted coal, and carried a garbage can labeled “pig food” down to a side exit where it would be picked up in the morning by the “pig man.”

The Steward was a kind soul. He carried out his duties quietly and humbly, as though seeking redemption, perhaps, for sins he had committed while in the British Navy. I was wary with him at first, but after I had conscientiously carried out several chores I could feel him warming up to me, and towards the end of the stint he treated me to coffee, sweets and cigarettes.

Starvation was not part of the penalty; a plate of hot food was served on the back stairs leading to the garbage dump. At night I cleaned all the bathrooms and laid bright blue carpets in the new Qual Office upstairs. The only remaining task then was to help the Steward set late tea.

Being assigned the correct Condition was supposed to bring a members Good Indicators In. One came out of a penalty more “beautiful” than when one went in, and the harsher the penalty the deeper the cleansing. One of the top-ranking Sea Org members was known to go through all the Conditions, from Enemy up to Power, mentally, each day before breakfast, as a spiritual exercise. I had heard several people aver that while working through a Condition they experienced cognitions about the Ethics system, the organization and L. Ron Hubbard. I enjoyed no such revelation, but merely relief at being put to some physical activity for a change.

My penalty ended at 1 a.m. I spent the rest of the night stretched out on the floor of the front waiting room, because of the rule prohibiting those in Liability from leaving the premises until they had a petition OK’d by Ethics and had then worked through Condition of Danger to Condition of Non-Existence. Sea Org members began leaving their rooms on the upper floors at 7 a.m. I had my petition ready for signing. Having seen and signed several petitions during easier times, hanging around the lobby, I knew how one should look:

I, Robert Kaufman, having been assigned Condition of Liability for Upper Level Out-Tech, have applied the Liability Formula as follows:

(1) I realize that Ron is my friend;
(2) I have delivered a paralyzing blow to the Enemy, in this case my own stupidity and inability to duplicate instructions;
(3) I have made reparations to the group by working twelve hours in the scullery, the bathrooms, and Qual Office.
(4) I now ask the permission of the members of the AO for me to rejoin the group.

One of the first I approached for a signature was the fetching blond, Ethics for that day. “You’re not giving people any choice,” she said. “Draw a line down the middle of the page and make one side for the `yeses’ and the other for the `nos’.”

Petition in hand, I hovered in the foyer with a young man who had just come off a three-day Doubt penalty and was practically asleep on this feet. We met students at the top of the stairs with, “May I have your permission to rejoin the group?” Some grabbed the petitions and affixed their names without so much as a glance. Others read the Formula carefully. No one placed their name in the `no’ column.

I entered the office of the Commander of AOUK to get his signature. He pointed at the pencilled line and said, “What’s this?”

“Ethics wanted me to include a column for possible `nos’.”

“That’s total invalidation! Scratch that column. Do you wish to Put In Your Postulates for no?”

The consenting vote of every member of the group was required by rule — the Conditions Board in the main corridor included about 200 crew members and visiting students — but Ethics accepted my petition at 60 names. She went to the Conditions Board, moved my nametag up to Non-Existence, and sent me to Central Files for four hours to work up to Danger, the next Condition. I passed the Steward standing in the hall, a padlock chained to one of his wrists. The padlock was part of a new Sea Org crew Doubt Penalty Formula tacked up on the bulletin board. I wondered what the Steward had done since I’d last seen him a few hours ago.

After a penalty one hour of review and a day in Cramming were mandatory. I gave Accounts $28 for both, and went to the review waiting room. It was a depressing place. Morose preclears, Clears and OTs studied Ron’s Conditions Formulae bulletin or stared into space. Conversation was sparse. Periodically an officious young woman, determined to raise her stats, came by and dropped stacks of envelopes to be stuffed onto our laps. That day the only person in the room with a happy face was the young man who had just worked three days up from Doubt. From time to time I glanced up at him from my envelopes and painfully returned his smile. During a security check he had confessed to false attestation of an Upper Level, as well as an Outness all the way back on his Solo Audit. This meant that he would have to do everything from and including Solo all over again, at cost. Now that he had been found out and had started making reparations to the group with his 72 hours of straight work, his face held a look of dopey contentment. As he put it during one of our exchanges of smiles, “I’ve never felt better in my life.”

Some of the people had been sitting there for days. The only ones showing their impatience were a few chain smokers. We would wait there for as long as we had to for review. The next session might be the one. The auditor would finally ask the question that would resolve everything. And auditing was communication not to be found elsewhere. Pure communication — question, answer, acknowledgment, controlled gaze — that spread through body and mind like a candy-sweet narcotic. No matter how lonely and alienated we felt, for the brief time we were being audited, we belonged. For those of us who had known the unspeakable disillusionment that clearing and the Upper Levels brought no gains and Scientology might never work, auditing itself was now the main fix.

 
—-

 
After I had waited another day, an auditor put me through the green-form, and Qual Office sent me to Cramming. The task awaited me of sorting out body thetans.

“It’s not as difficult as you’re making it,” said Cramming. It was late in the afternoon, and we had barely scratched the surface of my confusion. I was now most in the dark about the buttons. The working of the instructions seemed ambiguous. Did one make the Incidents run by flattening one button at a time or by calling all of the ten buttons on the list without interruption? And how could simply calling a button flatten it?

I had no more confidence now in my ability to audit body thetans than when I first saw the instructions. The instructions didn’t cover how to talk to a body thetan or how the self-auditor knew which one he or she was talking to. Those sounds and visions: Were they “real”? I might have imagined them. Ron had suggested that the whole thing was a mockup. Did the pre-OT pretend that it was real until he got bored and admitted to himself that he was merely imagining the lethal scene as he’d been told? Or had there really been a bombing Incident…?

I didn’t ask Cramming such questions, and the ones I did ask she couldn’t answer satisfactorily without breaking the rule by adding her two cents to the instructions. The data I needed weren’t there and Cramming couldn’t help me. The OT III process was dangerous, whether “real” or “mockup.” I looked at Cramming imploringly. She had done all she was allowed to do for me, and now her eyes were half-closed with fatigue.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she said. “You’re trying to gain from me the certainty you lack. I can’t give you that certainty. You’d better go talk to the Examiner.”

The Examiner stared at me. “You still don’t know how to do the process?”

“Maybe another day in Cramming.”

She eyed me ominously. “Robert, you’ve been in Cramming two solid days now. We can’t do your Upper Levels for you. There’s one thing you’d better realize about OTs: They’re the bravest people in the world. They have guts. Getting to be an OT isn’t easy, and if you think it is then you’re never going to make it. We’re going to teach you to toughen up here. You’ll be grateful for it later. NOW GO HOME AND AUDIT!”

I slouched out of Qual and went down to the street. Out in the fresh air my spirits made somewhat of a recovery. How could I have made such a shameful spectacle of myself before the very souls who were trying to help me? I must make my mind up. I would not embarrass myself again before the Examiner, even if I fell into The Wall of Fire.

Hell-bent and out of control, I returned to my room to plunge into the nightmare waiting on OT III.

 
—-

 
While getting meter and reports set up, I concentrated on keeping my determination to get through the process, but a new paralyzing confusion assailed me. Not only was it a mystery which body thetans had gone and which still needed auditing. I was no longer sure who the preclear was. Was I the preclear or was it a body thetan? I had written “Preclear: Robert Kaufman” on my auditor’s report forms. But how could I still be a preclear after I had attested clear? Then again, if a body thetan, not myself, was the preclear, if I didn’t set it free then I was the one who must suffer, not alone from the guilt of leaving the preclear in the middle of an engram but from acute physical and mental pain as well. And if more than one preclear was involved, the pain was compounded.

That body thetan over my left eye: I’d left the preclear stranded. I called to it. There was a faint rustling on the meter — the thing was still there. I felt compassion for the creature. It had meant me no harm to begin with. Was it suffering as I was?

“Go to the beginning of Incident 1 and go through it to the end,” I commanded. Nothing moved. I called one button after another. Still nothing moved. The needle was frozen in the middle of the dial. The tone-arm was stuck fast at 4.5. The meter had packed. I turned it off and wrote up a summary report. The session had lasted ten minutes.

My thoughts raced. I must get away from this, go out for a walk or a movie. But driven by self-destructive madness I went back into session moments later.

The needle tugged laboredly towards the left. The tone-arm climbed to 5 as I felt the pressure building up in my head. After a few minutes I had to stop. I paced up and down the floor.

Darkness. It was late in the evening. I lit a cigarette. Why not smoke while auditing? Whatever happened in session, I would be soothed by tobacco. I whipped into session, the cigarette between my lips.

So I wasn’t sure about the body thetans. All right, then I must find one I can be sure of. I will scan my body until I get a definite read which leaves no doubt.

I sat at the meter for twenty minutes, in a trance, smoking and scanning, as my body gradually turned into a field of electric charge and my head bloated with the pressure. The body thetans were there now. I had left several of them restimulated in prior sessions and at last they were rebelling. I was kicking them up all over me, making them crawl around on my skin and inside of me.

I stopped looking at the dial and continued to sit there, clutching a tin can and a ballpoint pen, methodically destroying myself. I keyed in devastation in every area. After a while the leech-souls were swarming in and out of every particle of flesh in my body.

The tone-arm reached 6. The machine had turned despicable. It was persecuting me for the wrongs I had committed. Of course: The loathsome material was housed in the E-meter! From Solo Audit on it had been traveling through the tin can into my hand and thence to my brain. Now it was inside me. The E-meter was the nasty little storage box for all the offal of the galaxy. The implants were locked up in the electric box until the outcome of procedures designed to test the worthiness of a thetan. Only one who had learned of the implants from Ron was infected with the vile material; only one who was pure in his devotion to Ron escaped the havoc. That explained those irremovable rust marks on my hand. Session after session I was being branded. And somewhere in the back of my brain was the echo of a shattering hydrogen bomb blast deep within a volcanic crater billions of years ago…

I was an OT III casualty, as described in the bulletin, in line for complete case-review. The Sea Org must find out what was tearing me apart and patch me up again.

 
— Robert Kaufman

 
Although copies of his book became very hard to find thanks to the litigious tactics of the Church of Scientology, Kaufman continued to revise and add to it online into the 1990s. His account of how he and his friend Paulette Cooper were harassed for publishing books was very helpful to us in our own book about Paulette, ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.’ It was Paulette who announced to Scientology watchers at alt.religion.scientology in 1996 that Kaufman had died of cancer. He was 63.

 
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Scientology gets a new uplifting ad

Luke Ayers, Scientology’s great Australian hip hop hope, continues to make short films pitching the church — he shot the Stephen Ridley spot we posted on Thursday — and we have to wonder, is he trying out for a job or something? Well, we don’t know how many people he’s going to rope in with this cheery sentiment…

 
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Scientology’s celebrities, ‘Ideal Orgs,’ and more!

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 Scientology front: Drug-Free World/Truth About Drugs!

 
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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] KID CORPS: When a disease outbreak brought Scientology unwanted attention
[TWO years ago] Leah Remini’s Scientology series opens with a gut-wrenching story of ‘disconnection’
[THREE years ago] Strange scenes from the Moscow hearing that banned Scientology yesterday
[FOUR years ago] Jon Atack: At the heart of Scientology is L. Ron Hubbard’s paralyzing use of contradiction
[FIVE years ago] Jenna Miscavige Hill on Scientology’s New Dawn: “I Can’t Believe People Still Buy This BS”
[SIX years ago] Scientology Leader David Miscavige Added as Defendant in Ken Dandar’s Federal Lawsuit

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on November 24, 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…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates

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