Ancient Mysteries - The Terrifying Cult Of Scientology

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Behind celebrity headlines lies a far more controversial story.This video explores the allegations, secrecy, and control mechanisms that have led critics to describe Scientology as one of the most troubling modern cults. From insider accounts to public controversies, we examine why it continues to generate fear and debate.Some organizations are more unsettling the closer you look.⚠️ Viewer discretion is advised.

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With the support of Export Development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities, discover new markets, and keep our nation front and center on the global stage. The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. Hey there, curious minds. Today we're cracking open one of the wildest rabbit holes in modern history. A story where a broke science fiction writer somehow built a multi-billion dollar empire, convinced Hollywood's biggest stars to sign up and declared war on the United States government and won.

We're talking about Scientology, the organisation that charges you hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn that your problems are caused by the ghosts of aliens nuked in a volcano 75 million years ago. And no, I'm not making that up. That is literally what they teach you, but only after you've already handed over your life savings. So buckle up because this one gets dark, weird, and way more insane than any sci-fi novel Hubbard ever wrote. Before we dive in, smash that like button if you're into stories about power, money and manipulation on a global scale,

and drop a comment telling me where you're watching from. I want to see how far this thing reaches. Whether you're in Tokyo, Berlin, San Paulo, or chilling somewhere in Kansas, let me know. Now let's get into it. So let us start with the man behind the curtain, because every great scam, sorry every great religion, needs a charismatic founder. And Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska,

was nothing if not charismatic. Before he became the supreme spiritual leader of a global empire, Hubbard was something far less glamorous. He was a pulp fiction writer, and not the Quentin Tarantino kind. We are talking about the cheapest, most disposable thought, form of entertainment that existed in 1930s America. Stories printed on rough wood pulp paper, sold for a few cents,

and typically forgotten by the time you finished your morning coffee. Westerns, mysteries, adventures, romance, sci-fi. Hubbard wrote all of it. He cranked out stories under at least 15 different pen names, including the wonderfully absurd Winchester Remington cult, which he reserved, unsurprisingly, for westerns. The man was basically a one-person content fact. decades before that term even existed. He was reportedly producing between 75 and 100,000 words

per month, which is roughly the equivalent of writing an entire novel every four to five weeks. Not exactly the pace of someone who carefully polishes each sentence, but hey, when you're getting paid a penny per word, quality is a luxury you literally cannot afford. Now, Hubbard was not a bad writer. Let us be fair here. Some of his stories, were genuinely entertaining. His horror novella fear actually earned praise from big names like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, which is a bit like getting a thumbs up from the gods of the genre. His novel Final Blackout, a story about a British officer who rises to become dictator of the United Kingdom after a nuclear war, was considered one of the better sci-fi novels of its era.

But here is the thing. Being a respected pulp writer in the 1930s was kind of like being a popular street performer. Sure, people enjoyed watching you, but nobody was getting rich off it. Hubbard and his first wife Margaret were, by all accounts, constantly struggling with money. One of his friends from that period described them as being in fairly dire financial straits, sustained mostly by whatever Hubbard could earn from his typewriter. Not exactly the lifestyle of a future religious Messiah, is it? More like ramen noodles and overdue rent, which unfortunately the Galactic Overlord Zinu cannot fix. Then came World War II, and Hubbard joined the Navy. Now his official Scientology biography paints this as a heroic chapter,

brave officer, decorated veteran, wounded in combat. The actual military records tell a somewhat different story. He briefly commanded two ships and was removed from command both times. He spent the final stretch of his active service in a hospital being treated for various complaints. After the war. He sought psychiatric help at a veteran's charity hospital. This is not me being cruel.

These are documented facts from his service record, and they matter because what happened next is one of the most remarkable pivots in the history of self-reinvention. A struggling writer with a rocky military career and mounting personal problems somehow decided that the solution to all of this was to write a book about how the human mind works.

Not a novel, not a short story, a book that claimed to be science, you know, as one does. That book was Dianetics, the modern science of mental health, published on May 9, 1950. And this is where the story goes from mildly interesting to genuinely bonkers, because Dianetics was not published by some fringe press in a basement. It was published by Hermitage House, a legitimate New York publisher of psychiatric textbooks. The editor of

astounding science fiction, John W. Campbell, had been an early supporter of Hubbard and helped generate massive pre-release buzz by running articles about Dianetics in his magazine. Campbell's readership, Over 150,000 science fiction fans who were already familiar with Hubbard's name became the built-in marketing machine that most authors would sell their left kidney for. And it worked. Dionetics shot up the bestseller list like a rocket. It spent 28 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over 150,000 copies in its first year alone.

For a book that the entire medical and scientific establishment immediately rejected as nonsense, those are staggering numbers. the American Psychological Association literally issued a formal resolution telling psychologists not to use Dianetics techniques. One reviewer compared its popularity to the Velikovsky craze and called it frightening proof of the confusion of the contemporary mind. But people kept buying it anyway. So why did Dianetics explode the way it did?

To understand that, you have to understand America in 1950. The country had just survived the most devastating war in human history. Millions of veterans were coming home with what we now call PTSD, but what back then was vaguely labelled shell shock or combat fatigue. Professional therapy was expensive, stigmatised, and largely inaccessible to ordinary people. Freudian psychoanalysis could take years and cost a fortune, and the results were questionable at best.

Into this vacuum walked Hubbard with an incredibly simple and seductive promise. You can fix your own mind at home with a friend, and it will only take about 20 hours. No expensive therapist required, no years on the couch, just find a buddy, follow the instructions in the book, and boom. You will achieve a superhuman state called Clear, with superior intelligence, perfect health, and morally pure intentions. It was essentially a do-it-yourself therapy manual for a generation that desperately needed one and had nowhere else to turn. That it was scientifically meaningless was, unfortunately, beside the point. The core idea of Dionetics was deceptively straightforward. Hubbard argued that the human mind

had two parts, the analytical mind, which is rational and logical, and the reactive mind, which is basically a hidden storage unit full of painful memories called Ngrams. These engrams, were recorded during moments of unconsciousness or trauma and silently sabotaged your life from behind the scenes, causing everything from anxiety and depression to actual physical diseases. The solution was a process called auditing, where a trained practitioner, or just your roommate who read the book, would guide you back through these traumatic memories until they were erased. Once all your engrams were gone, congratulations, you were clear. Hubbard compared this achievement to a milestone for humanity, on par with the discovery of fire, and superior to the invention of the wheel. Modest claims for a guy who had been writing penny a word adventure stories just a few years earlier.

The public demonstration of Dianetics, however, did not exactly go as planned. In August 1950, riding the wave of his book's success, Hubbard organized a showcase at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He presented a young woman to the audience as the world's first clear, someone who had supposedly achieved perfect and complete recall of every moment of her life. The audience was packed with reporters and photographers. This was going to be the triumphant moment that proved Dianetics work. except it did not. When people in the audience started testing her memory with basic questions,

she could not answer them. She could not even recall the colour of Hubbard's tie, his explanation. He had accidentally said the word now when calling her to the stage, which somehow froze her mental abilities in present time. You have to admire the creativity of that excuse, if nothing else. It is the intellectual equivalent of saying the dog ate my homework, but with a straight face and in front of thousands of people, But the embarrassment of the clear demonstration did not slow Dianetics down. People were hooked.

Hundreds of Dianetics clubs and study groups popped up across the country like mushrooms after rain. The money was pouring in, but here is where the story takes its most cynical and arguably, most brilliant turn. Because while Dianetics was a massive cultural sensation, it was also a financial and legal nightmare. The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was hemorrhaging cash. foundations in multiple cities had to be shut down. Hubbard was going through a brutal divorce from his second wife, Sarah Northrop, who publicly accused him of kidnapping their daughter, torture, and, this part is particularly noteworthy, she stated that experts had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia

and recommended long-term hospitalisation. The scientific community had universally rejected his work. Practitioners were getting arrested for practicing medicine without a licence, and in the ultimate insult, Hubbard actually lost the intellectual property rights to dionetics in bankruptcy proceedings. Imagine that. The man who invented the system was legally barred from profiting off his own creation. That is the kind of plot twist that even Hubbard himself might not have dared to put in a novel. So what do you do when your self-help empire is collapsing? The scientists are laughing at you. The courts are shutting you down and your ex-wife is telling

reporters you're insane. If you are Elron Hubbard, apparently you start a religion. and this is where we need to talk about one of the most famous and most disputed quotes in the history of modern cults. Multiple independent witnesses from Hubbard's science fiction days reported hearing him say some version of the same idea that the real way to make money is to start your own religion. The exact wording varies depending on who you ask. A fellow writer named Lloyd Eshbach recalled Hubbard telling him in 1949 that he would like to start a religion because that is where the money is. Sam Merwin, an editor at Thrilling Science Fiction, said Hubbard repeatedly mentioned that starting a cult would be the easiest path to wealth. Science fiction legend Harlan Ellison claimed he was literally in the room the night Hubbard decided to do it, describing a conversation among writers where someone jokingly suggested founding a religion, and Hubbard responded with total seriousness.

Theodore Sturgeon, another giant of sci-fi, independently corroborated a similar story. Now, the Church of Scientology vehemently denies that Hubbard ever said anything of the sort, and they have even taken publishers to court over it. But when five or six different people who knew the guy all independently remember him saying essentially the same thing, well, you can draw your own conclusions. Regardless of what Hubbard did or did not say at a science fiction convention, his actions speak for themselves. In December 1953, the first Church of Scientology was incorporated in Camden, New Jersey.

Alongside it, he also registered something called the Church of American Science and the Church of Spiritual Engineering, which sound like they were named by a random word generator with a theology degree. Those two were quickly abandoned, but the Church of Scientology stuck. The following year, in February 1954, the first proper Church of Scientology was established in Los Angeles, and by 1957, it had been granted federal tax-exempt status by the IRS. The transformation from secular therapy business to religious organisation was not exactly subtle. And that is what makes it so fascinating, because we can see the strategy laid out in almost real time. When Dianetics was just a self-help system, Hubbard had no legal protection from the medical establishment coming after him.

Practitioners were being charged with practicing medicine without a license. The FDA was breathing down his neck. The taxman wanted his cut, but the moment you slap the word church on the door, everything changes. Staples Preferred Business Membership, built for busy business owners, because you've got bigger things to think about. With Staples Preferred, get free delivery, no minimums.

Staples Preferred unlocks up to 3% back, plus 10% savings on print and exclusive wireless offers. One less thing on your plate. Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca.ca. Preferred. That was easy. In the United States, religious organisations enjoy a staggering array of legal protections.

They are exempt from federal income tax. Donations to them are tax deductible. They are largely shielded from government interference in their internal affairs. They can claim that their practices are matters of faith rather than science, which neatly sidesteps the whole problem of your therapy techniques being called pseudoscientific. Because who can prove that a religious ritual does not work? It is not exactly a five-star legal defence, but it is surprisingly effective. Think of it this way. If you open a clinic and promise to cure diseases with a gadget, the government will shut you down. But if you open a church and promise spiritual healing with the same gadget, suddenly you are protected by the First Amendment.

Same gadget, same promises, completely different legal outcome. Hubbard recognized this loophole and drove a truck through it, and the makeover was thorough. Over the following years, Hubbard issued directives mandating that Scientology organisations display crosses, hold Sunday services, and establish chapels in their buildings. Councillors were renamed ministers and told to wear clerical collars. Customers became parishioners. Franchises became missions. The organisation literally dressed itself up in religious clothing, in some cases quite literally. Many long-time Scientologists were confused by these changes,

because the whole culture had been entirely sected. Some staff members worried that suddenly hanging crosses everywhere would scare people off. But Hubbard was not concerned about aesthetics. He was building a legal fortress. Visual evidence that Scientology is a religion are mandatory, he declared. Not optional, not suggested, mandatory. Because without that visual evidence, the taxman and the FDA and the courts would come knocking, and they already had. Now, here is where it gets interesting from a global perspective.

because while the United States eventually granted Scientology full religious status and tax exemption in 1993, much of the rest of the world looked at this rebranding exercise and said, essentially, nice try. Germany has consistently classified Scientology not as a religion, but as a commercial enterprise and a potential threat to democracy. The German government has gone so far as to put Scientology under surveillance by its domestic intelligence agency. France has similarly treated it as a business. and has prosecuted the organisation for fraud. Belgium investigated it for criminal activity.

In the United Kingdom, a charity commission ruled in 1999 that Scientology was not a religion and refused to register it as a charity, though it was later recognised as a non-profit in a separate proceeding. The Netherlands granted tax-exempt status in 2013 and then revoked it two years later after a court determined that Scientology's auditing fees were more expensive than most commercial education institutions

and therefore appeared aimed at making a profit. So the same organisation is simultaneously a protected church in Washington and a suspect enterprise in Berlin. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of consistency in international religious law, but it does highlight the fundamental question at the heart of this whole story. Is Scientology a faith or a business? The answer, naturally, depends entirely on which government you ask and how many lawyers they have had to deal with.

But let us say you have decided, despite everything we have just discussed, that Scientology sounds interesting, and you want to give it a shot. Maybe you saw a commercial during the Super Bowl. Maybe Tom Cruise seems really enthusiastic about it. Maybe you are just curious. Great. Welcome to the Bridge to Total Freedom, which is Scientology's grand spiritual roadmap,

the path that every member must follow to achieve enlightenment. It is presented as a large chart, printed in red ink on white paper, hanging on the wall of every Scientology organization in the world. Think of it as a spiritual staircase, except each step costs more than the last. You cannot see where the top is, and if you try to leave, everyone you know will stop talking to you. Other than that, totally normal staircase. Here is how it works. You start at the very bottom of the chart with some genuinely harmless stuff.

Communication courses, life improvement workshops, maybe a free personality. test, which, spoiler alert, will always reveal that you have serious problems that only Scientology can fix. These early steps are designed to be affordable, accessible, and, frankly, useful. A lot of former Scientologists have said that the introductory courses actually helped them. They learned better communication skills. They felt more confident. They met nice people who seemed genuinely interested in their well-being. And this is the genius of the system, because those first few rungs of the ladder are legitimately positive experiences. They give you just enough real value to think, hey, maybe there is something to this. It is the same principle that every good

dealer uses. The first taste is free. Or in Scientology's case, the first taste is merely affordable. But once you're on the bridge, the prices start climbing and climbing and climbing. The next levels involve a process called auditing, which is the core spiritual practice of Scientology. You sit across from a trained auditor who asks you a series of deeply personal questions about your life, your fears, your traumas, your secrets, essentially a guided tour of your most vulnerable moments. The auditor records everything, and I mean everything. Your answers are written down and kept in folders that the organisation maintains indefinitely. Think of it as a confession without the seal of the confessional, because unlike a Catholic priest, your Scientology auditor's

notes can and do get reviewed by other people in the organisation. That detail will become very important later when we talk about how Scientology maintains control over its members. Now, during auditing, you are connected to one of the most famous gadgets in the history of pseudoscience, the e-meter or electrocycometer. This is a small device with a dial and a needle, connected by wires to two metal cylinders that you hold in your hands. The Church of Scientology treats it as a sacred instrument that can detect the spiritual weight of your past traumas. In reality, it is a simple device that measures galvanic skin response. Essentially, how much your hands sweat when you are emotionally stressed. It works on the exact same principle as a polygraph lie detector, which, for the record,

is also not accepted as reliable evidence in most courts. When you think about something stressful, your body produces micro-sweat, your skin's electrical resistance drops, and the needle on the e-meter twitches. The auditor watches this needle like a hawk and interprets its movements according to a elaborate system of readings that Hubbard developed. A floating needle means you are doing well. A stuck needle means there is something you are hiding. A rising needle means you are withdrawing from the session. The psychological effect of this setup is remarkably powerful. You're sitting in a quiet room, holding these metal cans, pouring out your deeper secrets to a person who appears to be monitoring your very thoughts with a scientific instrument. The e-meter becomes, in the eyes of the

believer, a window into the soul. It creates the overwhelming impression that the organisation can literally read your mind, that there is no point in lying or holding back, because the machine will catch you. An Australian government inquiry in 1964 put it bluntly. The device enables Scientology to assume, intensify, and retain control over the minds and wills of its subjects. Its use can be so manipulated by cunningly phrased questions that almost any desired result can be obtained. Strong words from a government inquiry, but when you understand the mechanics, they make perfect sense. The e-meter does not read your thoughts. It reads your stress level, but in the hands of a skilled auditor, that distinction becomes invisible. The auditing continues as you move up the bridge, and the cost escalated a pace that would make a luxury car dealer blush.

Each level of auditing is sold in blocks of 12 and a half hour. called intensives. At the lower levels an intensive might cost around five or six thousand dollars. As you progress through the grades, grade zero, grade one, grade two and so on, each step peels away another supposed layer of your reactive mind. By the time you reach the level of Clear, which is where Hubbard promised you would be free of all your neurosis and psychosomatic illnesses, you have likely spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of $128,000 on processing alone. But here is the thing, Clear is not the top. It is not even close to the top. Above clear are the OT levels, operating Theton, where you're supposed to develop

genuine superhuman abilities. We're talking telekinesis, telepathy, the ability to leave your body at will. The cost for reaching OT8, the highest level currently available, has been estimated at between $365,000 and $380,000. And that is a conservative estimate for an average case. Some people have spent far more. For context, that is roughly the price of a nice house. in many parts of the country, except instead of a house. You get the belief that you can move objects with your mind, which unfortunately has a terrible resale value. And the brilliance, or the cruelty, depending on your perspective, of this system is that at no point along the way does anyone tell you the full picture. The early courses seem reasonable. The first auditing sessions feel genuinely

therapeutic. Each level promises that the next one will be even more transformative. You keep climbing because stopping feels like admitting defeat, and besides, you have already invested so much time and money that turning back seems unthinkable. Now remember how I mentioned earlier that Scientology charges you hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about aliens and volcanoes? Well, buckle up because we have arrived at the part of this story

that sounds like it was written during a fever dream by someone who watched too many bee movies. And the wildest part is, this is not a joke, this is actual sacred doctrine. This is what Scientologists are expected. to believe as absolute spiritual truth once they have climbed far enough up the bridge and emptied their bank accounts sufficiently. The story goes like this. Seventy-five million years ago there existed a vast galactic confederacy made up of 76 planets, including Earth, which at the time

was called Tigyak. Running this cosmic operation was a tyrant named Zeno, sometimes spelled X-E-M-U, because apparently even the man who invented the story could not keep the spelling straight. Now Zinu had a problem. His planets were severely overpopulated, with an average of around 178 billion beings per world. His solution to this demographic crisis was, unsurprisingly, not to invest in educational family planning. Instead, Zinu had billions of his people rounded up, paralyzed, loaded onto spacecraft that looked exactly like DC-8 airplanes. Yes, the commercial jetliner, and shipped them to Earth. Once here, they were stacked around the bases of major volcanoes, then Zinu dropped hydrogen bombs into the volcanoes and detonated them all at once.

Because when your population is too large, the logical step is obviously intergalactic genocide by nuclear volcano. Not exactly what you would call a measured policy response. But the story does not end with the explosions. That would be too simple. The souls of these murdered beings, called Thetons in Scientology terminology, were blown around by the nuclear winds and then captured in an electronic traps. These trapped souls were collected into clusters, packed together and taken to massive cinemas where they were forced to watch 36 straight days of 3D movies. These were not exactly popcorn entertainment either.

The films implanted false memories and misleading concepts into the Thetons, images of God, the devil, angels, crucifixions and other religious imagery that Hubbard claimed became the basis for all world religions. That is right. According to Scientology, Christianity, Islam, and every other faith on Earth are the product of a brainwashing film festival run by a space dictator 75 million years ago. After the screening marathon ended, these confused and traumatized thetons clustered together

and eventually attached themselves to human bodies as humanity evolved. These are called body thetons, and according to Scientology, they're clinging to every single person on Earth right now, causing all your problems, your anxiety, your depression, your bad relationships, your weird fear of clowns, all of it, body-thetons. And here is where the financial genius of this mythology really shines. To get rid of these body-thetans, you need advanced auditing, lots of it. At the OT3 level and beyond, Scientologists are taught to telepathically communicate with these parasitic spirits, one by one, and convince each body, Thetan, to relive its own trauma and then

leave. This process can take years and cost tens of thousands of additional dollars on top of the hundreds of thousands you have already spent getting to this point. It is essentially the most expensive exorcism in human history, except instead of a priest with holy water, you get a person holding metal soup cans and staring at a needle gauge. Now, the absolutely critical detail here is that none of this information is revealed to new Scientologists. When you walk into a Scientology centre for the first time, nobody mentions Zenu. Nobody talks about body thetons or nuclear volcanoes or cosmic film festivals. You're told about communication skills and personal improvement and unlocking your potential. The space opera stuff is locked away in confidential materials,

stored in secure cabinets and only revealed to members who have reached the OT3 level, which, as we discussed, requires years of dedication and a financial investment that could buy you a very nice house. Scientologists are even warned that reading this material before you are spiritually prepared could literally kill you. Hubbard himself, claimed. that while unlocking these secrets, he became seriously ill and nearly died. The organisation warns that unauthorised exposure to OT3 materials could cause pneumonia. Neumonia. From reading a story about space aliens.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. The reason the secrecy matters so much becomes obvious when you think about it from a recruitment standpoint. If someone walked up to you on the street and said, Hey, would you like to join an organisation that believes a galactic warlord nukeed billions of aliens in volcanoes, and their ghosts are stuck to your body right now. You would probably cross the street. But if someone approaches you with a free personality test helps you improve your communication skills

and slowly builds a relationship of trust over years while you invest increasing amounts of time, money and social connections into the organisation. By the time you finally learn about Zinu, you are so deeply embedded that leaving feels impossible. Your friends are all Scientologists. Your family might be Scientologists. You have spent your life.

life savings. Admitting that the whole thing might be based on the fever dream of a science fiction writer is psychologically devastating, so most people do not admit it. They accept it and keep climbing. And that brings us to what is arguably the most uncomfortable irony of this entire story. The man who created this mythology, this tale of galactic war, alien souls, hydrogen bombs and cosmic brainwashing, was a professional science fiction writer. Hubbard spent decades cranking out pulp stories about space adventures, alien civilizations and intergalactic conflict. And then he founded a religion whose core cosmology reads exactly like one of his rejected manuscripts. You could not write this plot twist in a novel because no editor would believe it. A sci-fi author invents a space

religion, charges people hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn his plot, and then warns them they will get pneumonia if they read it without paying first. It is either the greatest con in human history or the most spectacular case of a man who could not tell his own fiction from reality. Either way, it is staggering. But Scientology does not survive purely on belief in Zinu and Body Thetons. Visit BetMdmdm casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario.

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Visitactivia.ca for more details. Plenty of organisations have weird beliefs. What makes Scientology exceptional and exceptionally dangerous, according to its critics, is the sophisticated system of psychological control that surrounds those beliefs. And to understand how that system works, we need to talk about something called thought reform.

In 1961, psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton published a groundbreaking study called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, based on his research into brainwashing techniques used on prisoners during the Korean War. In it, he identified eight psychological criteria that define a totalitarian environment, eight features that, when present together, allow an organization to systematically reshape the beliefs, identity, and behavior of its members. And when you hold these eight criteria up against the practices of Scientology, The overlap is so precise it is almost eerie.

Let us walk through the most important ones. The first is milieu control, the control of information and communication. Scientology does this aggressively. Members are strongly discouraged from reading critical material about the organisation. News articles, books by former members, documentaries, even internet searches. All of it is labelled as dangerous material produced by suppressive persons. Scientology even has its own. internal terminology for negative information. It is called enthita, which roughly translates to

interbulated theta or disturbed spiritual energy. By giving critical information a scary sounding name and treating it as spiritually toxic, the organisation effectively trains its members to self-sensor. You do not need to physically lock someone in a room if you can convince them that the information outside the room will poison their soul. The second criterion is loaded language, and this is where Scientology truly excels. The organization has developed one of the most extensive private vocabularies of any group in existence. Everything has a special term. A critic of Scientology is an SP, a suppressive person. Someone connected to a critic is a PTSD, a potential trouble source. Negative emotions are overts and withholds. The physical universe is messed, matter, energy, space,

and time. Non-scientologists are Wogs. The list goes on and on, with hundreds of acronyms, redefined words and invented concepts that create what Lifton called a thought-terminating language. When every experience in your life can be reduced to Scientology jargon, when your entire mental framework for understanding reality is filtered through Hubbard's vocabulary, you gradually lose the ability to think about your situation in normal terms. You do not think I am being manipulated. You think, I am PTS, and need to handle my connection to the SP.

same situation, completely different emotional response. The third criterion is the demand for purity, the idea that the world is divided into absolute good and absolute evil, with no middle ground. In Scientology, you're either moving up the bridge toward enlightenment or you're being dragged down by suppressives. There is no neutral position. People who criticize or question Scientology are not simply disagreeing.

They're actively working against the survival of the human race. because Scientology positions itself as humanity's only hope for spiritual salvation. That is an enormous amount of moral weight to put on someone's shoulders. If you genuinely believe that the organisation you belong to is the only thing standing between civilization and cosmic ruin, then leaving is not just a personal decision, it is a betrayal of all of humanity. That kind of framing makes departure feel not just difficult but genuinely immoral.

And then there are the training routines, or TRs, which deserve special attention because they illustrate how Scientology conditions its members at a physical level. The most infamous of these is TR0, sometimes called the staring drill. In this exercise, two people sit facing each other, often just a couple of feet apart and stare into each other's eyes without moving, blinking excessively or reacting in any way, for hours. The goal, according to Scientology, is to develop the ability to simply be there comfortably without reacting. What it actually does, according to psychologists and former members, is induce a dissociative or trance-like state. After sitting motionless for extended periods while maintaining intense eye contact,

people frequently report experiencing visual distortions, feelings of detachment, emotional flooding, and a heightened state of suggestibility. In other words, TR0 softens your critical thinking, makes you more open to accepting whatever comes next, and feels like a profound spiritual experience, all of which makes you a better customer, not a better person, a better customer. The organization packages a mild hypnotic technique as spiritual training and charges you for the privilege. It is actually kind of impressive in a deeply unsettling way. All of these control mechanisms work together to create what psychologists call a closed system,

an environment where every piece of information, every relationship, every emotional experience is filtered through the organisation's framework. And once you are inside that system, leaving becomes terrifyingly difficult because the organisation has one more tool in its arsenal that makes departure feel like social death. That tool is the interconnected web of surveillance, informing, and enforced separation that keeps Scientology's members in line, and it starts with something called the Fair Game Policy. Originally laid out by Hubbard in 1965,

Fairgame declared that anyone who was designated a suppressive person, meaning anyone who actively opposed or criticized Scientology, was stripped of all protections within the Scientology system. They could, in Hubbard's own words, be tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed. In 1968, Hubbard officially cancelled the use of the term Fair Game, but, and this is important, he explicitly stated that the cancellation did not change any policy regarding the actual treatment of suppressive persons. In other words, they stopped calling it Fairgame but kept doing everything the policy described.

It was a PR rebrand, not a policy change. Imagine a restaurant renaming its food poisoning as a complementary digestive experience. Same result, better marketing. In practice, Fairgame has meant that critics, journalists, former members, and anyone else who publicly challenges Scientology can become the target of organized harassment campaigns. This includes private investigators, digging into people's personal lives, organized letter-writing campaigns to their employers, frivolous lawsuits designed to drain the target's finances, and sustained psychological pressure

intended to make speaking out so miserable that most people simply give up. One journalist described being shouted at, spied on, having his hotel invaded at midnight and being chased through the streets of Los Angeles by unidentified strangers while producing a documentary about the organisation. The Church of Scientology has an entire internal department. dedicated to this work, the Office of Special Affairs, or OSA, which functions as a kind of corporate intelligence agency. But fair game is aimed outward, at enemies. The mechanism aimed inward at members is arguably even more devastating. It is called disconnection, and it is the policy

that has torn apart more families than perhaps any other single practice in the organisation's history. Disconnection works like this. If a Scientologist has a friend, family member or spouse, who's been declared a suppressive person, because they criticise the church, left the church, or associated with someone who did. The Scientologist is required to sever all contact with that person. No phone calls, no emails, no visits, complete and total severance, parents lose children, siblings stop speaking, marriages end overnight. The Church of Scientology has repeatedly denied that this policy is enforced, but their own website acknowledges the practice and frames it as a human right, the right to choose who you communicate with.

Critics point out that calling it a choice is disingenuous when the alternative to disconnecting is being declared suppressive yourself and losing everyone else you know. The enforcement mechanism behind disconnection is the security check, a mandatory confessional process conducted on the e-meter. During security checks, members are asked an exhaustive list of deeply personal questions about their thoughts, behaviors and relationships. Have you ever had unkind thoughts about Scientology leadership?

Have you communicated with anyone who has been declared suppressive? Have you accessed critical material about the organisation? Every answer is recorded. Every confession is filed, and these files, called PC folders, are maintained indefinitely. They represent a comprehensive archive of a person's most intimate secrets, vulnerabilities and transgressions, all held by the organisation. Former members have testified that the contents of the organisation. these folders have been used as leverage, as a deterrent against leaving or speaking out.

It is difficult to publicly criticise an organisation that possesses detailed records of every embarrassing thing you have ever confessed to. The system is designed with elegant brutality. You're required to confess in order to progress spiritually, your confessions are recorded permanently, and those records become the chain that binds you. And for those who want to fully understand the depths of commitment that Scientology demands, we need to talk about its innermost circle, the sea organisation, commonly known as the Seahorg. If regular Scientology membership is like joining a gym, the Seagg is like enlisting in a private army that also happens to be a monastery, a labour camp, and a multinational corporation all at once, and it starts with one of the most remarkable documents in the history of employment contracts, or religious commitments, depending on who you ask.

When you join the Seorg, you sign a contract pledging your service not for five years, not for a lifetime, but for one billion years. That is a billion with a B, 1,000 million years. The church describes this as a symbolic commitment, reflecting the Scientology belief in reincarnation, the idea being that you will return in future lives to continue serving. The organisation's motto is Ravenimus, we come back. But symbolic or not, the psychological weight of signing a document that commits you for a billion years is significant. It creates a sense of permanence and totality that a standard employment contract simply cannot match. You're not just taking a job, you're dedicating your eternal existence. In exchange for this billion year commitment,

C-org members receive room and board and a weekly allowance that has been reported by former members to range from about $24 to $50 per week. For working, on average, over 100 hours. That works out to something like 25 to 50 cents per hour, which is not even in the same zip code as minimum wage. But because Scientology is classified as a religion in the United States, labour laws do not apply. Members are categorised as religious workers or volunteers, which means there is no legal minimum for their compensation. The Sea Org has effectively found a loophole that allows it to maintain a workforce of thousands of people, working around the clock for pocket change, all legally and all under the banner of religious

devotion. The living conditions reflect the compensation. C-org members live in communal housing called birthing, often sharing small rooms with three to 12 other people regardless of age. Sleep deprivation is reportedly common, with members frequently working 17 to 20-hour days during peak periods. Medical care is minimal, no health insurance is provided, and members who become ill are expected to deal with it without missing work. Meals are communal, and when organizational targets are not met, the quality and quantity of food can be reduced. Former members have described periods where the entire staff was put on a diet of rice and beans as punishment for underperformance, because nothing says spiritual enlightenment quite like nutritional deprivation as a motivational tool.

For Seorg members who break the rules, or are perceived to have broken the rules, there is the Rehabilitation Project Force, or RPF. Established by Hubbard in 1974, the RPF is a discipline, plenary program that functions as a combination of boot camp, prison and re-education centre. RPF members are required to perform eight or more hours of hard physical labour each day. Construction, cleaning, painting, groundskeeping, they must run everywhere instead of walking. They are forbidden from speaking to other Seorg members unless spoken to first and must address everyone as sir. They eat only after other members are finished, receiving whatever food is left over.

They are denied holidays, receive even less pay than regular Seorg members, and can be held in the program for years. Some former members report RPF assignments lasting up to a decade. Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of Seorg life involves the children. Many Seorg members are the children of Scientologists, recruited into the organisation as teenagers or even younger. Jenna Miskavage, the niece of Scientology leader David Miskavage, has publicly described being separated from her parents. parents at age 12, working 14-hour days and receiving little to know formal education. Children born to Seorg parents have historically been raised in communal settings with minimal

parental contact because the demands of Seorg service leave virtually no time for family life. In fact, the organisation's policy has shifted over the years from discouraging children to effectively prohibiting them. Seag members who become pregnant have been pressured to choose between their child and their position in the organisation. Former members have testified to being pressured towards. abortion in order to remain in the Seahorg, though the Church denies this. Members who choose to keep their children are typically required to leave the Seahorg, and those who leave without

authorization are declared suppressive persons and cut off from everyone they know through the disconnection policy we discussed earlier. So we have talked about the rank and file experience of Scientology, the endless auditing sessions, the staggering costs, the thought control, the surveillance, the Seagre labour camps. But there is an entirely different version of Scientology that exists in parallel, one that looks nothing like the world we just described. It is the version that celebrities see, and understanding the gap between these two realities is essential to understanding how the organisation has survived public scrutiny for as long as it has. The strategy of recruiting famous people was not an afterthought. It was baked into the

organisation from the very beginning. Back in 1955, Hubbard launched something called Project Celebrity, an actual internal program that identified specific high-profile individuals the church wanted to recruit, and offered rewards to Scientologists who successfully brought them in. The original target list reportedly included names like Maline Dietrich, Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway. None of those particular targets took the bait, but the underlying principle remained a cornerstone of Scientology strategy for decades to come. Hubbard understood something that most religious leaders of his era did not, that in the 20th century, celebrities are the most powerful evangelists on the planet. A single famous face associated with your organization is worth more than a thousand

pamphlets. It is essentially free advertising that comes with built-in credibility, at least in the eyes of the public. To service this strategy, Scientology established dedicated celebrity centers, special churches designed specifically for artists, entertainers, politicians, and other influential people. The flagship celebrity centre in Hollywood is housed in a stunning 1920s building modelled after a French Normandy chateau, which the church purchased in 1973. Inside, celebrities receive an experience that is galaxies apart from what regular members encounter. There are private entrances, separate parking areas monitored by security, exclusive auditing rooms, personal course rooms, and a level of luxury that would make a five-star hotel jealous.

Sea Org members, the same people earning $50 a week and sleeping in communal bunks, are assigned to cater to celebrity members, attending to their every need. If anything goes wrong in a celebrity's experience, the responsible Seag member can face severe punishment. The organisation essentially runs a luxury concierge service for the famous, powered by the labour of people who have given up everything for their faith. And no celebrity has been more central to Scientology's public image than Tom Cruise, introduced to Scientology by his first. first wife, Mimi Rogers, in the late 1980s, Cruz became not just a member, but arguably the single most important public relations asset in the history of the organisation. His relationship with Scientology leader David Miscavage deepened into what has been

described as a genuine friendship. Muscavich served as best man at Cruz's wedding to Katie Holmes. Within Scientology, Cruz is treated with a reverence that borders on worship. Former senior members have described how Miskavage personally oversaw Cruz's auditing experience, ensuring he received the absolute best auditors and the most favourable treatment possible. Low-level members detail his cars, prepare his meals, and manage his personal affairs. In 2004, Miscavage even created a special award, the Scientology Freedom Medal of Valour, specifically to give to Cruz. It is a level of VIP treatment that makes first-class airline

service look like a middle seat in economy. The problem, of course, is that the Scientology Tom Cruise experiences bears almost no resemblance. to the Scientology experienced by ordinary members, Cruz sees beautiful facilities, devoted staff, personal attention, and spiritual progress. He does not see the cramped birthing, the rice and beans punishments, the family separations,

or the RPF labour assignments. Former high-ranking officials have stated explicitly that the celebrity experience was meticulously stage-managed so that no high-profile member would ever witness anything the church did not want them to see. The Celebrity Centre was, in the words of one former executive, the perfect stage for the act that Scientology put on, and if the celebrities took things at face value, which most of them did, they would simply see the performance and never glimpse what was happening behind the curtain.

It is the ecclesiastical equivalent of a Potemkin village, except with better catering and more attractive people in the lobby. But all the celebrity polish in the world could not solve Scientology's most fundamental problem, its relationship with the United States government. And the story of how that relationship played out is frankly, one of the most audacious chapters in the history of organized crime. Yes, I said organized crime. Because what the Church of Scientology did to the American government in the 1970s

was not a disagreement. It was not a legal dispute. It was espionage on a scale that would make a Cold War thriller blush. It was called Operation Snow White, and it remains the single largest proven infiltration of the, the United States government in history. Beginning in 1973, the Guardian's office, Scientology's internal security and intelligence arm, run at the time by Hubbard's wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, launched a systematic campaign to infiltrate government agencies across the globe.

The goal, at least officially, was to locate and purge any unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder from government files. In practice, it involved planting undercover operatives inside 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates across more than 30 countries. At its peak, the operation deployed up to 5,000 covert agents. Let that number sink in. 5,000 people, secretly working inside government offices on behalf of a church. These operatives were trained in surveillance, recruiting, infiltration, and, because why not, blackmail. They obtained jobs as clerk typists, secretaries, and administrative staff inside agents. agencies like the IRS, the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even the

United States Coast Guard Intelligence Service. Once inside, they stole documents, copied classified files, planted listening devices, and forged correspondence on official government letterhead. In one particularly brazen operation, a Scientology agent broke into an IRS conference room the night before a meeting about Scientology's tax status and planted a bug in an electrical outlet, which transmitted the entire meeting to operative sitting in the parking lot. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it,

like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to? To talk to fans, Spotify advertising, you're among fans. In May, 1975 alone, one operative stole, photocopied, and replaced 30,000 pages of documents, a stack that stood 10 feet high. The Guardian's office was not playing around. As one journalist put it, their operation was more sophisticated than the espionage agencies of many small countries. The scheme began to unravel in 1976 when two operatives were caught accessing restricted areas. One of them, Michael Meisner, eventually turned himself into the FBI

and revealed the full scope of the operation. In July 1977, the FBI conducted simultaneous raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., seizing mountains of evidence. Eleven high-ranking Scientologists, including Mary Sue Hubbard herself, were convicted of crimes, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, burglary, and theft of government property. Elron Hubbard was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, but was never formally charged, as prosecutors could not definitively link him to the criminal activities, despite the fact that the whole program had originated from his own written orders. The convicted officials received prison sentences,

and the Guardian's office was dismantled and replaced by a new body called the Office of Special Affairs, which the Church assured everyone would operate within the law. Whether it actually has is a question that Scientology's critics continue to debate vigorously. But here is the part that truly defies belief. Despite being caught running the larger spy operation against the US government in history, Scientology did not lose its war with the government. It won. After years of legal battles with the IRS over its tax-exempt status,

which the agency had revoked in 1967, after determining that church funds were enriching Hubbard personally, Scientology launched a campaign of legal and psychological warfare that ultimately forced the government to surrender. The church filed approximately 2,500 individual lawsuits against the IRS and its employees, not against the agency as an institution, against individual human beings who worked there. Simultaneously, private investigators were hired to dig into the personal lives of IRS officials, looking for anything that could be used as leverage.

One former operative described spending hours cultivating a relationship with a female IRS official at conference, then turning her personal information over to the church. Stolen IRS documents were leaked to a newspaper columnist who published embarrassing stories about agency officials living lavishly at taxpayer expense. The pressure was relentless, personal and designed to make the cost of fighting Scientology greater than the cost of giving in. In 1991, David Miskavage personally met with the IRS Commissioner to propose a settlement. For two years, the IRS conducted what it called the most.

comprehensive examination of any applicant for religious tax exemption in its history, reviewing over a million pages of documents. And then, in October 1993, the IRS caved. It granted full tax-exempt status to the Church of Scientology and all of its affiliated organizations. A 25-year-old tax bill estimated in the billions was settled for just $12.5 million. The church was even given the right to extend tax exemptions to future branches on its own, effectively allowing it to grant itself further tax-free status. In exchange, Scientology agreed to drop its 2,500 pending lawsuits. Miscaviz announced the victory to 10,000 cheering Scientologists at a massive rally. The government of the United States, the most powerful entity on the planet,

had essentially been worn down by a church that simply refused to stop suing, investigating and harassing till it got what it wanted. It was not a legal triumph. It was a war of a war of of attrition and the IRS blinked first, and that brings us to the man who engineered that victory and who has ruled Scientology with an iron fist ever since, David Miskavage. When Elron Hubbard died in January 1986, at the age of 74, the question of succession was complicated. Hubbard had appointed a long-time aide named Pat Brooker as his intended successor, but Miskavage, who had been steadily accumulating power within the organisation since his teenage years as a member of the Commodore's messenger organization, moved quickly to sideline Bruecker and seize control.

By 1987, Miss Cavage had installed himself as chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Centre, the corporation that controls all Scientology trademarks and copyrights. In practical terms, this made him the absolute ruler of the entire Scientology empire, even though the title sounds like it belongs on a corporate organizational chart rather than a religious hierarchy. It is the equivalent of becoming Pope by getting yourself. appointed CEO of the company that owns the copyright on the Bible. Technically corporate, functionally absolute. Under Miscavage, Scientology has undergone a dramatic transformation,

though not necessarily the kind the organisation would want to advertise. On one hand, the physical infrastructure has expanded enormously. Scientology has purchased massive real estate holdings around the world, grand buildings in major cities, refurbished and maintained to gleaming perfection. The organisation is estimated to hold billions of dollars in assets. On the other hand, actual membership appears to have declined sharply. While Scientology has historically claimed millions of members worldwide, independent surveys and investigations suggest the real number is dramatically lower.

A 2001 survey by the City University of New York found that approximately 55,000 people in the United States would identify Scientology as their religion if asked. a far cry from the millions the church claims. Former insiders describe a hollowed-out organisation where massive buildings sit largely empty, maintained by skeleton crews of Seagg staff, while the leadership focuses less on recruiting new members and more on extracting maximum revenue from those who remain.

And the allegations against Muscovage personally are staggering. Multiple former senior executives, people who work directly alongside him for years or decades, have publicly accused him of routinely physically assaulting subordinates. They describe being punched, slapped, kicked, choked and thrown to the ground by the leader of the church, often in front of other staff members. Former executives have testified to being confined in the hole, the double-wide trailer compound at Gold Base where Miscavich reportedly held dozens of senior leaders for extended periods,

subjecting them to sleep deprivation, verbal degradation and forced confessions. One former member who was held in the hole described Miskavage organizing a violent game of musical chairs in which participants were told that the losers would be sent to remote Scientology outposts far from their families. Miskavage and the Church of Scientology deny all of these allegations and typically respond by attacking the character of anyone who makes them. And then there is the matter of Shelley Miskavage, David's wife, who has not been seen in public since August 2007, when she was spotted at her father's funeral. Her disappearance has become one of the most talked-about mysteries surrounding Scientology. Former members believe she's being held at a remote church of spiritual technology compound

near the mountain town of Running Springs in California. Actress Leah Remini filed a missing person report with the Los Angeles Police Department in 2013, but the investigation was closed within hours and declared unfounded. The LAPD stated they had made contact with Shelley. Critics have questioned whether that contact. was genuinely independent or whether it was facilitated by the church itself. Her niece, Jenna Miscavage Hill, stated in a 2025 interview that she believes Shelley is alive but essentially trapped. The question, where is Shelley, has become a cultural meme, referenced in television shows,

late-night comedy segments, and award show monologues. At the 2003 Golden Globe Awards, the host joked that the Golden Globe's Tom Cruise had returned could be traded for her safe return. It is simultaneously funny and deeply disturbing, a punchline that masks a genuine human concern. So where does all of this leave Scientology today? After everything we have discussed, the origin story of a pulp fiction writer who turned his rejected manuscripts into sacred scripture, the financial machinery of the bridge, the alien mythology, the thought control, the family separations, the spy operations, the celebrity shield, the violent leadership. What is the future of this organisation? The honest answer.

is that Scientology is simultaneously dying and unkillable. In terms of active, practicing members, the organisation is clearly in steep decline. The exodus of high-profile members over the past two decades, Leah Remini, Paul Haggis, Lisa Marie Presley, Jason Beggy, and many others, has generated a steady stream of public testimony about the organisation's inner workings. Documentary films like Going Clear and television series like Leah Remini, Scientology and the aftermath have brought the organisation's practices to mainstream attention in a way that was simply not possible before the internet age. Books by former members have become bestsellers. The information firewall that once kept Scientology's secrets hidden behind locked cabinets and confidentiality agreements

has been comprehensively breached. Anyone with a smartphone can now read the Zinu story in about three minutes, which rather undermines the whole pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn its business model. But here is the paradox. Even as membership shrinks and public perception craters, the organisation itself is extraordinarily difficult to dismantle. Scientology sits on an estimated fortune of several billion dollars, much of it invested in real estate, hundreds of properties around the world, from office buildings in Manhattan to sprawling compounds in California, to a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Real estate does not need members to retain its value. The organisation also continues to enjoy tax-exempt status in the United States,

which means it pays no federal income taxes on its revenue, and unlike a traditional business, it has no shareholders demanding quarterly returns, no board of directors pushing for profitability, and no market forces threatening to render it obsolete. It is, in many ways, a perpetual motion machine, an organisation that can continue to exist indefinitely on the strength of its accumulated wealth,

regardless of whether anyone actually walks through the door. So what are the possible futures? The first scenario is slow, quiet decline. Membership continues to drop. The remaining members age out, and the organisation gradually becomes a kind of ghost church. Beautiful buildings maintained by a skeleton staff, hosting services that nobody attends,

funded by investment returns and rental income from its property portfolio. This is arguably already happening in many cities where Scientology has purchased large buildings that sit conspicuously underutilised. The second scenario is radical reform. A future leader, either a reformist within the church or a successor to Miskavage, could theoretically liberalise the organisation's most controversial practices, abolish disconnection, open the books, eliminate the most abusive aspects of the Seagg. This would represent a fundamental reinvention of the organisation,

essentially admitting that the model Hubbard built was broken. Whether such a reformer could survive the internal power structure that miscavage has created is another question entirely. Scientology does not have a tradition of peaceful transitions of power. It has a tradition of the most ruthless person in the room, seizing control, while everyone else is still reading the policy letters. The third scenario, and perhaps the most likely in the long run, is transformation into something that no longer resembles a church at all. With billions in real estate, established corporate structures, and tax-exempt status, Scientology could effectively become an investment fund wrapped in religious packaging. The buildings become assets.

The theology becomes branding. The organisation continues to exist not because anyone believes in body-thetons or galactic overlords, but because the legal and financial structure is simply too valuable to abandon. It would be the ultimate fulfillment of that alleged Hubbard quote about religion being the best way to make money. Except instead of making money by selling spiritual services, the organisation makes money by simply existing as a tax-exempt property empire. Whatever happens next, the story of Scientology

will remain one of the most extraordinary case studies in the history of belief, power, and the human capacity for both incredible devotion and staggering manipulation. It is a story about what happens when a brilliant, charismatic, deeply flawed individual discovers that the line between fiction and faith is thinner than anyone imagined, and that once you cross it, there is an enormous amount of money to be made on the other side. If you made it this far, you're clearly someone who appreciates a deep dive. Hit that subscribe button so you do not miss the next one,

and leave a comment telling me what you think. Is Scientology dying, transforming, or just getting started on its next act? I will see you in the next one. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair.

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