Scientology | The Underground Bunker

Ray Emmons, 1942-2017: Clearwater’s cop who sniffed out Scientology’s secrets

[Ray Emmons, left, with Robert Peterson at Flag Down in 2014]

Yesterday, Ray Emmons died of a heart attack. He was 75. We’re remembering him here at the Underground Bunker with the help of Robert Peterson, 68, who got to know Ray when Bob was working for the Lisa McPherson Trust in […]

KID CORPS: Scientology wanted to turn children into little machines of Sea Org efficiency

Like anything else in Scientology, how children are treated is governed by a huge number of policies and reports, and in this series we’re looking documents that show how children were treated under the ideas of L. Ron Hubbard. We’re fortunate that one man has done so much to collect huge numbers of such documents […]

Mirriam Francis: Picturing Scientology parents who abandon their children to abuse

Leah Remini’s second season of Scientology and the Aftermath started off with a hammer blow to the church — a devastating episode about child molestation in Scientology that was condoned and covered […]

Chris Owen: How one country, at least, is savaging Scientology’s privacy nightmare

[Hungary’s Attila Péterfalvi]

We’re glad to have back Chris Owen, author of the important work Ron, The “War Hero.” After last week’s police raid of Scientology’s “Ideal Org” in Budapest, Chris is helping us make sense of what the government there is […]

Tonight on ‘Leah Remini’: The business of Scientology, and the pitfalls of suing it

Tonight, at 10 pm A&E airs the second “special” episode in the second season of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, an episode which tries to come to grips with Scientology’s rapacious business model and how people get caught up in […]

Despite Scientology’s best efforts, a Bunker reader attended Saturday’s grand opening

On Saturday, Scientology leader David Miscavige opened his newest “Ideal Org,” his ongoing and very expensive effort to create a Potemkin Village of new and empty cathedrals to pretend that the rapidly shrinking church is actually undergoing “unprecedented expansion.” If this weren’t just all about fakery and PR, then Scientology wouldn’t expend so much energy […]

Wally Hanks, Scientology ranch terror recently portrayed on ‘Leah Remini,’ dies at 70

Wally Hanks, the employee at the 1990s Scientologist-run Mace-Kingsley Ranch in New Mexico who was heard terrorizing a child on an audio tape played back for an episode of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath that aired on October 10, died Friday night at a hospital in Southern California. He was 70 years […]

KID CORPS: Scientology’s internal documents lay out its disturbing ideas about children

Tuesday night, Leah Remini’s A&E series once again provided harrowing stories of what it can be like to grow up in Scientology. Her guests, Mimi Faust and Christi Gordon, spoke about the frightening result when Hubbard’s ideas about children being adults in small packages gets put into […]

Scientology’s Flag Building brain injury: In Clearwater, it’s déjà vu all over again

[Scientology’s playground for wealthy patsies]

December 5 will mark the 22nd anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson. Two years ago, for the 20th anniversary, we produced a lengthy series re-reporting her final days in real time, to get a sense of how her terrible experience played out over several […]

Raid in Hungary: Scientology’s Cold War tactics are colliding with 21st Century data privacy

[Police outside the Budapest org. Photo: Szabó Gábor]

Yesterday, when we saw news stories pop up briefly announcing that the Budapest Scientology “Ideal Org” was raided by police, we knew just who to turn to. Those stories said that some 50 police officers carried out the raid, but there were virtually no other details. So we […]

Search