Ever wondered how authoritarian groups like Scientology manage to exert such control over their members? Renowned author Jon Atack joins us for a riveting exploration of Scientology's psychological grip and the arduous journeys of those who break free. Jon's book, "Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky," serves as a pivotal resource for many former members seeking to heal, and in this episode, he recounts his meticulous writing process to ensure its accuracy and impact. From his own entry into Scientology in 1974 to his departure through the independent movement, Jon reveals the manipulative tactics of guilt, fear, and thought-terminating clichés crafted by L. Ron Hubbard to enforce compliance.
But it doesn't stop there. Listen as Jon shares personal anecdotes that peel back the layers of Scientology’s inner workings. Ever hear of the Operating Thetan Committee, UK? Jon’s unexpected stint as chairman offers a unique lens into the organization’s structure and the fervor of its followers. We touch upon the creation of the Reconnection newsletter, a beacon for disaffected members, and the contentious history of Scientology, which includes internal conflicts and the reworking of Hubbard’s controversial texts. Through Jon's extensive research and collaborations with other experts, we piece together a complex and often contradictory narrative of Scientology's past.
And what's a discussion about Scientology without addressing its darker aspects? We cover the harrowing case of Lisa McPherson, the deceptive strategies used by the organization, and the legal battles faced by publishers. Intriguingly, we also examine the influences on L. Ron Hubbard, including his curious mix of admiration and condemnation for Freud. This episode provides invaluable insights into how to encourage critical thinking among Scientologists, fostering open dialogue without coercion. Tune in for a comprehensive look at how former members navigate the challenging path to recovery and the importance of maintaining free and open communication.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
And welcome back to the channel.
I am Claire Headley, your hostfor today.
This is my next episode of LifeAfter Scientology and I have
the honor of interviewing MrJohn Atack.
Welcome back, john.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hi, claire, good to see you again.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Great to have you back and today.
I appreciate you being willingto do this.
We are going to delve deep into.
Let's Sell these People a Pieceof Blue Sky, your amazing book
that I think is a critical pieceof anyone's recovery from
Scientology.
I hope you would agree withthat statement by me.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Well, that's what it was written for.
When I wrote it, I reallywasn't thinking about anybody
other than people who'd beenharmed by Scientology or
affected by Scientology, and itmeant that the writing of it was
very careful.
In fact, stacey Young, who didthe dead Agent, the attack on
(01:08):
Ben Corridan's book, when sheread it said she couldn't find
anything in it to take apart.
So I'd become aware of how theywill pick at things.
It needed to be reliable and,apart from a couple of tiny
things, there is actually anattribution to the 30th of
February which only one personhas ever commented on, and I
(01:31):
invented the word, undoubtedly.
Oh, there you go.
It's intended to kind of unpicksome of the nonsense that
Hubbard blurts into our headsblurted into our heads.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yes, yes, and so getting into the timeline, you
got into Scientology in 1974 inyour late teens, correct?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I was 19, and I think it was the 11th of December.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Oh, there you go.
You, like me, have a mindthat's clearly set on dates, to
be precise.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, isn't it interesting?
I think you're the only otherperson I've met who has this
thing about.
Oh, what was the exact momentthis happened?
Yes, having done all of thatdate locating in Scientology
you'd have thought these peoplewould be good at it, but they
aren't.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
No, no.
Well, you know we'll get intothat, but I think when you start
to blur facts and disregardfacts to get along and toe the
line, then you know a lot ofthings can get warped in
perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Absolutely, absolutely.
And when you use a system thatactually induces false memories
and teaches you how to inventthings, then that can really
mess with people's ability toremember things properly.
And for me, part of it is thatI did deliberately reconstruct
my memory towards the end of mytime in Scientology and having
left Scientology, because I'dbeen led to believe that my
(03:12):
memory was in some way damagedwhile I was in Scientology and I
came to realize it was probablya little bit better than most
people's in fact, and theremight be something a bit
autistic about the dates, Idon't know probably in my case
too, who knows?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
um.
Okay, so 1974 to 1983, and Ifound it interesting again, um,
that your path out was throughthe independent Scientologist
movement.
Mine was not, and I think thata big difference there from my
(03:51):
perspective is simply that I wasborn into Scientology.
So it was never a choice for mepersonally, and I've always
been of the view that when itbecame a choice, ie after I had
been declared a suppressiveperson and I was never going to
be afforded the opportunity tospeak to my family ever again
(04:12):
anyway, then the burden ofhaving to, you know, remain in
the belief system because of theleverage they had over me.
They had already, you know,burned that.
So it became my own personalchoice, at which point I was
(04:33):
done and walked away.
And but I've seen many peopleand I'd love to get your comment
on this who, when they leave,they do they, they have in their
mind.
It seems to me that they'vecouched it in such a way that,
well, they're no longer part ofthe organization, but they still
(04:53):
believe in Hubbard's writings.
So, before I ask you your viewson this, my view on this is
that that has a lot to do withthe deep programming and
language associated withScientology, because if they no
longer believe, then they're asuppressive person, or there's
(05:14):
all these labels that go alongwith that, or there's all these
reasons that Scientology andHubbard specifically
manufactured that explain thatthat very often keep people in
for much longer.
What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I mean it fits into the general pattern of the way
we behave as human beings.
It's not exclusive in any wayto Scientology.
So the way that you trapsomebody into something is you
make them feel guilty and youmake them feel frightened.
And so the induction of guilt,the induction of phobia.
(05:51):
And with any and everyauthoritarian control group and
I personally don't think theword cult is pejorative, it just
means a group of people thatidolize a leader or a doctrine,
but we are careful with the Cword so with any authoritarian
(06:15):
sect you'll find that there isthe fear of what will happen to
you when you leave, that youwill decline.
You know that you will decline.
In many of the pseudo-Christiansects the idea is that, hey,
you'll go to hell, you'll bedamned.
(06:35):
Now the Moonies go one muchbetter than this.
Not only will you be damned,but all of your ancestors will
be damned.
And that gets kind ofcomplicated when you realize
that we have common ancestors.
So I don't know how far backthat's meant to go.
But then you have groups wherepeople are told that they'll
suffer accidents.
I have a friend of mine,christian Sherko, who's a
brilliant counselor, and he hada case where somebody she'd left
(07:00):
the building where the groupwas, but she didn't dare cross
the road because she was surethat she'd be hit by a car.
Wow, so you have thesemechanisms functioning and then,
as you say, you have the loadedlanguage, the language trap,
whereby and Hubbard's verycarefully done this thing it's
about the words, it's not aboutthe context of the words.
(07:22):
So conceptual understanding iswho knows what that is in
Scientology?
You're meant to just understandwhat the words mean, and he
then gives you two 600-pagedictionaries of definitions,
which are often contradictory.
So if you look up Q&A, forexample in a Hubbard thing,
you've got these variousdifferent meanings of it and
(07:46):
sometimes it becomespreposterous.
So, for example, a tiger is afailed staff member and Hubbard
said it's a tough universe andonly the tigers survive.
And that could be true.
And people, we become lockedinside the concepts that are
underneath the words, and peoplewill often then brush the word
(08:08):
off the top, so they'll stopsaying dev t or something like
that um, which is the one thatthe people often hold on to
curiously yeah, no, I I stillhonestly have not found a good
substitute for that word.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
No.
I was doing Developed trafficbecause it's such a broad it
covers so many things in onebucket that it's hard to find an
equivalent in the real worldlanguage.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, we'll do a show about that sometime.
Okay, but it is that one is2015.
I met Nancy Manning and shesaid there is just this one word
I can't get rid of.
And I said DevT.
And she went how did you knowthat?
So yeah, there are alternatives, but we won't get into that
(09:04):
because I can't think of themoffhand that's okay yeah,
messing about you know andnonsense stuff, that that's a
waste of time wasting.
There are all sorts of thingsthat go around.
It developed unnecessarytraffic and you can actually
develop it further to the dev otoh yeah yeah, so the devotees
(09:26):
of scientology developedunnecessary operating thetans or
devotees.
um, it can be used in differentways.
So, and there's a wholeconstruction of thought.
Um, I'm working on a book atthe moment which is based on the
premise that absurd beliefs canlead to atrocious behaviors.
(09:46):
And, looking at one set ofideas after another, if you
start to believe these things,then it becomes inevitable that
you will behave in certain ways.
And in Scientology, a goodexample my late dear friend,
shona Foxness, came to me manyyears ago and she said why are
(10:08):
you wasting your time doing allof this stuff with
Scientologists?
They pulled it in and I'm kindof that was a bit more Irish
inflected there.
That wasn't very good, but theypulled it in and I kind of
looked at her and said Shona, soif a four year old is just
about to go underneath the bus,you're not going to stop them
because they pulled it in.
And I kind of looked at her andsaid Shona, so if a
four-year-old is just about togo underneath the bus, you're
not going to stop them becausethey pulled it in.
(10:29):
This idea, this idea of karma,vipaka, action-reaction, that
we're all caught up in thisthing, that we're suffering the
consequences of our past actions, which is an absurd nonsense.
Which is an absurd nonsense.
It's not possible for auniverse with even if they were,
just if the only living thingsin the universe were the things
(10:50):
on this planet, let alone theother hundred billion galaxies
or whatever, then every time agiant clam gives birth, it has
two billion little babies, andthe idea that there's somebody
writing down the karma of all ofthese things and making sure
that the right moment arrivesfor 417 people to die in an air
(11:13):
crash.
The mathematics just becomesimpossible.
But it's a great way ofcontrolling people, saying
everything that happens to youis your fault and it's because
you've been bad that bad thingshappen.
And it's so much a part of ourculture since Christian science,
which is where Hubbard got itfrom, and it becomes the secret,
the law of attraction, therules, prosperity, christianity,
(11:37):
this idea that you can somehowcontrol reality from this little
node of being.
If there are eight billion ofus, just as humans, doing that,
let alone the other species, itall becomes so incredibly
complicated.
But you can make people feelguilty and you can make them
feel frightened.
And so I mean, it is fair tosay, conway and Siegelman, who
(12:02):
wrote an excellent articlecalled Information Disease,
which is the first thing that Iever read about thought reform,
mind control, many, many yearsago.
But they also wrote a bookcalled Snapping and in it they
say that Scientology may havethe most debilitating set of
rituals of any cult in America,and they wrote that in 1990.
(12:26):
Here we are the dates again.
And in 2014 I wrote somethingfor tony ortega saying you know,
I don't think they interviewedenough people, and tony, being
tony, of course, published thisto embarrass me at great good
friend and and wrote conway andsiegelman and they said no, we
interviewed 33 Scientologists,you know.
(12:48):
So we got some idea.
So I wrote to them.
I was in touch with them forthe first time and said you know
, you said that you think thatwith the Krishnas or the Moonies
, it takes three to six monthsbefore somebody recovers, but
with Scientology, you reckon ittakes 12 and a half years
without assistance.
And I said you've had time tothink about it now.
Would you agree with me thatmost people, having left
(13:10):
Scientology without assistance,won't recover?
And they agreed with me.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, I completely agree with that as well, I do.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
It's just so invasive and there's nothing else quite
like it.
You come to have a completelydifferent internal reality to
any other people around you.
You're viewing the world interms of, you know, suppressive
persons and engrams and goals,problems, masters and locks and
secondaries, and just this hugevocabulary of material that is
(13:48):
fanciful and fabulized.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, and in my case and I think anyone born into
Scientology would agree withthis I learned the language of
Scientology concurrent tolearning the English language,
so for all intents and purposesit was a first language, even
(14:12):
without the context.
So you know, some of myearliest memories included
statements like stop being banky.
I had no idea what thederivation any.
I'd never read Dianetics, I'dnever even knew what the
reactive bank was.
But I came to understand as afour-year-old child what banky
(14:33):
meant.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, a few years ago I wrote something for
Tony Otega and had a remarkableemail from I don't remember who
it was, but somebodyex-Scientology kids and I'd said
something about thesloganeering in Scientology and
the way that you have all ofthese thought-terminating
clichés, these ways of make itgo right, all of this kind of
(14:57):
stuff, and that many of them arenegative.
And within days they talked totheir various members and I
think they sent me a list of 350put downs from the scientology
literature and I looked I sawthat.
I saw that, I remember that yeah, and the next week I think
they'd added another hundred.
(15:18):
It just kept on going and itwas a remarkable piece of work
and something that that reallyshould be published and
republished, because howabsolutely horrible.
You know all of these ways ofundermining people and
controlling them, and of course,hubbard isn't shy about this.
He admits that Scientology is away of controlling people.
(15:41):
He admits it again and againand again.
You want to have 8C, you wantto have infinite control.
And when you do the upperindoctrination training routines
lovely use of the word therewhich are actually written by L
Ron Hubbard Jr and the wordjunior was tip-exed out after he
left and he says that whathappened was they were doing one
(16:03):
of their advanced clinicalcourses in in the 50s and his
dad said we've got rowdystudents, we've got to work out
ways of controlling them.
And he came up with the upperindoctrination training routines
, where you learn how to showanother person that you can
control their reactive mind sothey might be able to control it
.
Right, but you move into thisstep without thinking about it,
(16:25):
where these days in our societyto grab hold of somebody and
move them physically is nolonger considered polite.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Right.
And make them do something,regardless of whether they want
to or not.
Yeah, enforcing compliance, etcetera yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And you're teaching both sides of it, because you're
teaching how to controlsomebody, but you're also
teaching the person how tosubmit correct how to give in.
And so you get this wholebizarre thing.
You know this idea that staringat people will make them feel
more comfortable in some way.
It's like the police and themilitary use this technique to
control people.
It's a dominance techniqueRight Beautifully demonstrated,
(17:10):
of course, by Charles Manson oneof the world's more famous
Scientologists.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yes, completely.
So back to your book.
So you got out in 1984 and werebriefly… October the 18th 1983.
There we go.
Okay, 83, sorry, 74 to 83,right, that's it.
And so when did you tell me howthe what your path was to then
(17:37):
embark on writing this book inthe first place?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I think it was really down to meeting Captain Bill
Robertson that you know, and fora couple of weeks I believed
the crazy nonsense that he wasspreading around.
I came to know him pretty wellbecause he lived in East
Grinstead for eight months and Ialways got on very well with
him.
But he was obviously out of hismind and he watched me leave
(18:03):
Scientology and kind of go Idon't want to do any of it, and
he was so baffled that anybodycould possibly want to do this.
So it started with him becausehe arrived and that's why
October the 18th in my mind, I,three days before he was due to
speak at the Grand Hotel in EastGrinstead, a guy called Bevan
Priest came to me, woke me up Ihave a sleep late, I have a
(18:27):
delayed sleep wake phase and Iwoke up with this guy standing
by the bed, saluting me andasking me if I'd host this
meeting, and so I was obviouslysleepy.
So I said, yeah, all right.
And I get to the meeting and Ifind out I've been appointed the
chairman of the OperatingThetan Committee, uk, which was
brilliant.
Yeah, all right.
And I get to the meeting and Ifind out I've been appointed the
uh, chairman of the operatingthetan committee, uk, which was
(18:49):
was brilliant.
You know.
It's like wow.
I had no idea what that meant.
I had no idea that I've beenappointed this by captain bill
robertson.
He was the second deputycommodore of scientology and
therefore, with hubbard, afterthe picture of mary sue out of
the picture, he was technicallythe head of the Sea Organisation
, which is an interestingthought.
With him gone, I'm technicallythe head of Scientology now.
(19:10):
I think so if they'd like totransfer the bank accounts over
now, we can start giving themoney back.
But so I host this meeting andfind myself in the middle of
this thing going.
What happened?
And I started a newslettercalled Reconnection, most of
(19:30):
which is available on somewebsite.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
Yes, around 33 issues.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I haven't heard of that.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Ah, well, there you go.
Well, it's before your time,Claire.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yes, very much so.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
A little whippersnapper when I did this,
but it was really those of uswho were disaffected, which was
about half the membership.
Internationally there mighthave been as many as 40,000.
I don't think it's ever gonemuch beyond that and half of us
(20:09):
left and quite a lot of peoplejust that was them done with it.
But some of us still had thisfervor.
We still believed that this wasthis wonderful world-saving
medicine that was going to, youknow, liberate humanity, and so
we invested ourselves absolutelyand thoroughly in it.
I, I was that person.
(20:31):
I I was making sure I wasfighting, holding off the
attacks from the mother cultagainst the independent groups,
and we were among the firstpeople to talk about independent
scientology.
Back then.
It was certainly the first everpublic meeting in the uk of
disaffected yeah, about 60 of usthere, I think.
(20:52):
Yeah.
But I started meeting peopleand talking to people captain
bill's, the first one who hadtheir stories to tell me.
And, captain bill, his storywas that ron hubbard was dead,
he was on the mothership and hewas telepathically communicating
with Bill who wrote things downwhich he called sector
(21:12):
operations bulletins, SOBs, andthey were handwritten.
Wasn't it, though you know,sometimes the unconscious
reflection does happen.
The Freudian slip Right andthese were handwritten.
It looked exactly likehubbard's handwriting, except
(21:33):
for the capital a's.
They weren't, but I, I couldn'tyou know who was this person,
and they were signed astarparmegian and um I fat, you know
.
Bill then gave me a copy ofHubbard's script, or Suzette's
reworking of Hubbard's Revolt inthe Stars, which is the OT3
(21:57):
period is meant to be.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And Suzette being one of Hubbard's children.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
That's right.
One of the seven children thathe had by his three wives and
one of the six children who leftScientology one way or another
and Revolting the Stars, wasmeant to be set around 75
million years ago the evilgalactic, prince Xenu and all
(22:24):
this stuff, and in it there's acharacter called Astar Parmegian
and Astar Parmegian.
And Astar Parmegian is anightclub singer who is in love
with Elron Elray, and you canguess who Elron Elray might have
been.
And I later found out fromBill's girlfriend, who was a
close friend of mine, who livedwith him for eight months, that
(22:50):
he would take her to outside hisclothing stores on a Saturday
and point out the things hewanted, and then, at eight
o'clock every evening, if he hadnothing else to do, he'd put a
ball gown on and high heeledshoes.
Now Bill was six foot four andbig.
He'd been a Mississippimotorcycle cop, I was told, and
he would sing songs to El Ron ElRey.
(23:12):
So he was my first.
You know, it's like I got whathe said and it was like I don't
think his explanation of whathappened to Scientology is
correct, and I started talkingto people because I wanted to
know.
So the origin of the book is is,uh, an article I wrote for the
secondary connection that wascalled so what really happened
(23:36):
in which I tried to get how thecommodore's messenger
organization david miscavige,pat broker had taken over, how
the guardian's office had gone,how how the mission holders
conference had destroyed in asingle blow this very prosperous
and really the way that peoplewere recruited in Scientology.
(23:58):
It was just blown up and peoplewere coming out you know, david
Mayo's people were coming over,john Nelson, harvey Haber, who
both worked with Hubbard, andthey were telling me stories and
from there it just becamenecessary to collect all of this
together.
And originally I wrote a bookcalled the Scientology War which
(24:19):
was about Captain Bill and hisideas.
And then I realized nobody willunderstand this without
understanding Scientology.
So I then had to do a historyof Scientology and that was like
, well, they're not going to getthis without understanding
Scientology.
So I then had to do a historyof Scientology and that was like
, well, they're not going to getthis without, because they're
going to look at this and gowell, what kind of lunatic would
believe this nonsense, frankly.
So I had to put in my own storyto say, well, you know, I
(24:41):
didn't know about Xenu and thebody thetans.
Until I've been involved forseven years, it initially seemed
like a practical form oftherapy.
I read Science of Survival tostart with and it just, you know
, you didn't take.
You tried not to pay too muchattention to things like history
of man, where Hubbard's, youknow, talking about us all being
(25:02):
descended from clams and itbeing a cold-blooded and factual
account of our last 60 trillion, 73 trillion or 76 trillion
years, according to which partof the book you're reading.
I'm happy to say Miscavige hascorrected it all to 76 trillion,
but the first edition Hubbardcouldn't quite make up his mind
about how many trillion yearsthere have been, and that's a
long time given that we're in auniverse that's only 14 billion
(25:27):
years old.
So trillions, that's very big.
And so I wrote lots of articlesand I started to look at all of
the contradictions in Hubbard'sown biographies.
I collected 22 biographies thatwere copyrighted to Hubbard so
(25:48):
it's his responsibility and Irealized that no two of them
were the same.
And then along the way, quiteearly on in fact, I saw work
gathered by a journalist whocalled himself Michael Lynn
Shannon, and years later, whenOmar Garrison, who was the
official biographer of Hubbardwhen he was being harassed by
(26:10):
Scientology and turned up on mydoorstep to talk to me, he would
not believe that I'd not hadaccess to the Hubbard archive or
interviewed Jerry Armstrong.
But I hadn't.
There was enough materialavailable and I got involved
with other people who areresearchers and there was no
(26:31):
worldwide web.
So if I needed something fromthe montana historical society I
had to write them a letter andI got all of hubbard's navy
records.
I was the first person after hedied to get the navy, the fbi,
the veterans administrationrecords, um.
And by that time I was workingwith Russell Miller on his
(26:51):
barefaced Messiah, and Blue Skywas already pretty much done.
When Russell came along he wasprobably the highest-paid
journalist in the UK.
He was working at the SundayTimes and they commissioned him
to find Ron Hubbard.
This was in January 86.
And he came to me and said well, you know, can I hire you as a
(27:13):
researcher?
Here's £2,000.
I was like, oh, somebody wantsto give me money for doing this.
Incredible.
And because I just couldn't geta publisher, I'd written to 50
publishers.
11 of them came back and saidthey'd like to do the book, but
they understood that thelitigation would mean they
couldn't make any profit from it.
Neville Spearman.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
And sorry, what year was this?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
The original.
So January 86 is when Russellcame to me and I'd been putting
a manuscript around for abouttwo years then.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Okay, so 84 to 86.
And so when Russell came to you, you'd already had publishers
even back then saying theydidn't want to publish because
of the litigious approach ofScientology to any such books.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yes, and Neville Spearman, who ran Neville
Spearman Publishers and hadpublished the Mindbenders by
Cyril Vosper.
He wrote back to me a personalletter and I got the idea of
this guy in his 70s in hisSavile Row suit with his public
school accent, writing back tome and he explained it to me in
(28:26):
the letter.
He said you know, I'd love topublish the book but there is no
money to be made.
Um the mind benders sold 108000 copies and um most of that
money was lost in litigation.
Wow.
And he signed himself off deathto the evil cult, which I was
(28:47):
quite something, but I'd givenup.
I couldn't find a publisher andso I gave Russell my manuscript
.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I see.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And Barefaced Messiah and I was his researcher
through the whole 18 months ofthe project.
I was his expert witness in 87in the High Court in London.
I don't know if anybody elsealong the way.
You've probably been appointedan expert witness by now,
haven't you?
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yes, I testified in the Danny Masterson trial as an
expert witness.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah, and I think I was the first in 1987.
I don't think anybody had beenbefore and it was very
interesting to be in thatsituation where you are
considered your expertise isvalued by the court.
You know you've shown that youknow enough about the subject
(29:39):
that your opinion can be trusted.
So you're not testifying tomatters of your own experience,
you're testifying based uponwhat you know about the subject.
So we won those cases inAustralia, in the US and in
England and so sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
So were those cases before Barefaced Messiah was
published.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
They were, yes, they were, yes, the attempt to injunk
publication in Australia andEngland.
In the US strange thingshappened that the book was
published and then it waswithdrawn, Even though Henry
(30:32):
Holt the publishers had won thecase.
The judge had warned thatbecause there was unpublished
copyrighted material in the book, which had all come from me
Hubbard's diaries, his teenagediaries, letters that he'd
written, guardian's orders thathe'd authored.
Every document that wasquestioned in the book had gone
to Russell via me, including theinfamous Skipper letter, the
(30:56):
1938 letter where Hubbard sayshe doesn't believe in
immortality and his only goal isto smash his name into history.
I'd been working withresearchers and collectors and
that's just the most incredibletreasure trove of, particularly
letters like the 10th April 53letter to Helen O'Brien where he
(31:21):
asks what she thinks of thereligion angle, which was a
fairly straightforward admissionon its part, and he says he
needs to be, fairly deeplyprophetic when you look at the
subsequent, where we are now?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Holy moly yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Isn't it, though?
And you know I mean that's awhole other subject.
As a Scientologist, I neverthought of Scientology as a
religion.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Me neither.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And it only became a big thing with people not being
conscripted to go to Vietnam,and so they'd take a one week
minister's course, and nowthey're exempt Right, and I know
that because I talked withpeople who'd successfully dodged
the draft by doing this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
And even then thereafter, it still wasn't
positioned or discussed as areligion, at least in my
experience growing up in it.
I never considered it areligion until 1993, after the
IRS exemption.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah, and I mean I got into a little bit of a of a
barney with janet reitman whenshe was working on inside
scientology, because she wroteto me and asked for my help and
I said, well, yeah, there areconditions.
The first is you don't tellanybody.
I'm working with you becauseI've been steamrolled and I
don't want to be harassedanymore.
And the second is a note thatyou call it the church and, um,
(32:51):
it isn't right.
And she came back with thisgreat defensive.
But there are people who reallydo believe it's a religion and
it's like no, I'm not sayingthat.
People believe it's a religion.
That's up to them.
It's not a church.
A church ecclesiast is achristian organization and
that's why he used the word andhe's conned us all into using
this per word, this friendlyword, to describe something that
(33:14):
is really not Christian.
And of course, it wasregistered by him in December 53
in Camden, New Jersey.
Have the registrations, alongwith the Church of American
Science, which is one of thelittle windows onto Hubbard's
real intentions.
Because when John Sanborn puttogether modern management
(33:35):
technology defined becauseHubbard never looked at the
things he'd written and Johnedited everything from 54 to 78,
he found a definition of theChurch of American Science and
it's in the book where it saysit's to recruit Christians and
move them on to something better, meaning Scientology, so the
word church.
There's also the Church ofHuman Engineering.
(33:56):
We still await the consequencesof that particular church.
It hasn't been activated yet,Right?
So I basically I'd written abook.
I couldn't get it published.
Russell had the manuscriptSince then Russell gave it to
Chris Owen.
He gave all of his material toChris Owen and Chris gave all of
(34:17):
his material to me.
So I've got the originaltypescript that I gave to
Russell, where Russell's crossedthings out and he's taken
chapter titles from me and he'staken whole sections um.
So probably about 50 percent ofbarefaced messiah came directly
from me wow but the other 50percent is brilliant research on
(34:37):
his part and his wife, renata,um, you know so, for example,
his interview with margaretroberts, who was hubbard's aunt
she's only eight years old wasonly eight years old and him,
from the age of six months to 12years old, he lived in the same
house as her.
And so we have this preciousinterview with this woman who
who, when she's asked well, whatabout him being a blood brother
(34:58):
with the Blackfoot Pakunipeople, she says I'm sorry, I've
never heard of that.
Um, so then, um, I mean thewriting of, so the writing of
the book was very much to.
You know where russell wasright.
He's a biographer, an exceptionbiographer he's.
(35:18):
Conan doyle is a really splendidbook, but he wrote about hefner
and getty, and so that that's,that's what he is, and so he
wrote a.
I wasn't seeking ever to writea biography.
I was seeking to say he saysthis here and he contradicts it
here, because if you want to getsomebody to the point where
they stop fanatically believingsomething, you have to use
(35:41):
cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And I will say I love the quotes that you used at the
beginning of the chaptersbecause it does.
It's such stark contrast.
You know, obviously, all of thequotes I'm familiar with, but
just the way you laid it out Ithought was very, very good and
very eye opening.
(36:03):
Thank you, anyway.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
So carry on and and that's that's also important.
The sequence with which you givesomebody information is vital,
and I decided that, for the mostpart, I would just follow a
chronology yeah um, so when thedead agent pack came out from
scientology, there were 60points in it and nearly all of
them is sort of he says thatthat Scientology was banned in
(36:30):
Victoria, australia.
In fact it was actually, andyou say, yeah, it's
chronological, that's when itwas banned.
If you read further you'll findwhen the ban was lifted, uh all
, but there were, I think therewere, three things, uh, of those
60 that weren't, that weren'tanswered within the book itself,
the other 57, they're all inthe book.
(36:52):
Very poor work.
Those three are all to do withVicky Asneran's statements,
because she, of course, havingmade those statements, said that
she'd perjured herself and, asI understand it, took an amount
of money and went away.
And I decided that she wastelling the truth in those
statements and if they wanted tosue me over that we could deal
(37:15):
with that then.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Fair enough.
Okay, so we're up to January 86.
You work with Russell Miller,so then what happens that your
book does then finally getpublished?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Oh, somewhere in early 88, late 87 in fact,
russell called me up and said hewas being followed by private
detectives and he was curious toknow if they were the same
private detectives who'd beenharassing Lyle Stewart, the
publisher who'd published BenCorridon's Elrond Hubbard,
(37:51):
messiah or Madman.
And would I ask Lyle Now Idon't actually know Lyle, but
it's fair enough.
You know, and Russell had donea story in China, he'd done a
story in Mexico, he'd done astory in Germany and there'd
been private detectivesfollowing him um, at great cost
to the Scientology parishioners,no doubt no doubt and he, so.
(38:15):
I phoned Lyle Stewart up and um.
Lyle's first statement was haveyou written a book about
Scientology?
I?
I said yes, and he said I'llpublish it.
That was the beginning of theconversation.
I later found out that anybodywho phoned him up he'd say have
(38:37):
you written a book aboutScientology?
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
And he was a rogue.
He was a guy who publishedbooks about gambling, which was
his favorite pursuit.
He published books about theIRSs, who were his favorite
target um and he basicallyultimately I didn't fare too
well from from the deal I madewith him, but I don't think that
was his fault.
He came to to england and wemet in a hotel in london.
(39:05):
He the contracts and he saidI've sold the publishing company
.
I've sold it for $12 million toa group called Carroll
Communications, but I'm stillrepresenting them.
Here are your contracts and Isign up.
And the guy who bought thecompany, Steve Schragis.
He had no idea what he'd boughthimself into.
(39:26):
And of course we're, then uh,before the book's published.
Now, on the lead up to that,this guy, dougie uh, came along
um driving a rolls royce, um,with his initials on it um on
the license plate and said oh,you know, I'm really rich and
(39:47):
and I want to help you publishthis book about Scientology.
This went on for about sixmonths and I very foolishly let
him have a copy of themanuscript, and then I was sued.
Now we tracked him down.
He was a private detective.
The Rolls-Royce was hired, Justhappened to have his initials
(40:11):
under the license plate Wow.
And he managed to entrap CyrilVosper in a kidnapped
deprogramming in Germany.
And before we went off toGermany, Cyril told me that he
was going to go off there andsomebody was going to be
kidnapped.
(40:31):
And I said you must not do that.
This is a dreadful thing to doand I would never and have never
approved of such things andit's utterly counterproductive
and unnecessary.
You don't lock doors on people.
You don't shut people up.
You communicate with people.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right, that's what Scientology.
Don't shut people up.
You communicate with people,right, that's what Scientology
does is lock people up, and sodefinitely very different
methods are absolutely required.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, and they've actually, of course, were
convicted of kidnapping anddeprogramming.
In the Guardian's Office 11case, mary Sue Hubbard admitted
in her 217-page stipulation ofevidence that she had ordered
people to kidnap Michael Meisnerand that he was held, I think,
for six months and all.
But, as you say, the Corganisation.
(41:21):
The amount of human trafficking, which is, of course, something
that you were the first peopleto try and do something about,
that you and Mark, yeah, and itis a reality that people are
being trafficked, they're beingenslaved and you know that false
(41:43):
imprisonment is the least of it.
The Lisa McPherson caseexemplifies.
You know, she was not onlykidnapped, she was tied down and
when she died she had ligaturemarks on her wrists and on her
ankles, died of dehydration inthe keeping of David Miscavige.
So, yeah, absolutely terrible.
(42:05):
For me, free and opencommunication is the only way to
go.
There are no tricks, none ofhubbard's hypnotic methods,
which is, uh, something.
I mean, they're brilliant,brilliant implanting of
scientology that you makesomebody phobic about an idea.
So psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, anything
(42:25):
that has the the word psyche atthe beginning of it, you're
phobic.
You know you can't do that.
I mean, jesse Prince told methat he had a copy of Blue Sky
for six years and didn't dareopen the cover.
And you kind of go, what'sgoing to happen?
Little demons are going to flyout and take, you know, and the
(42:48):
cover.
And you kind of go.
What's going to happen?
Speaker 1 (42:49):
little demons are going to fly out and take right.
You know, I, I had the.
I had the exact same.
Uh, I did the same thing withbarefaced messiah.
I had it for about a year, twoyears, not six years, but uh,
you know it's.
It's crazy that I thought Iwould be doing something that
couldn't be undone.
And finally, and this was inthe very early days after I'd
(43:13):
escaped from Scientology and wasstill very fearful of them but
finally, in my mind at that time, I thought to myself well,
hubbard describes the quotemultiple viewpoint system, in
which you're supposed to be ableto assess and hear multiple
viewpoints, like the scenario hegives paraphrased is when
(43:36):
there's an accident, multipledifferent people see the
accident and each of theirperspectives reflects what they
saw, which might be different,but you can piece it all
together.
So I thought well, what's wrongwith reading a book?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
I mean as a Scientologist.
I read Christopher Evans' Cultsof Unreason, I read the Mind
Pendants by Vosper.
But I remember a friendbringing a copy of Inside
Scientology by Robert Kaufmanand we decided we'd hand it in
because it said it's got the OT3material in it.
(44:16):
And I later came to know RobertKaufman, who is a fascinating
and eccentric human being, butit was a very valuable book, I
think.
But it was a very valuable book, I think, and that sort of that
was something that becamesignificant to me.
(44:36):
It's like the idea of thesuppressive person that I
shouldn't talk to these peoplebecause what are they going to
do to me?
Right, you know?
And that's me admitting thatI'm weak.
When I interviewed JohnMcMaster, the world's first real
(44:57):
clear, as Hubbard named him tohis own surprise, he said that
when you know?
Because he's right there whenthe fair game doctrine is being
written in 65.
And he said he sat with Hubbardand he said well, surely if
there are these suppressivepersons, we should seek them out
and change them, transform them, because that will change the
(45:21):
world.
Why are we running away fromthem?
Why are we scared of them?
And there is an answer to that.
But the answer is.
I don't think Hubbard ever gaveit, but it's from Christian
science, where he gets certainof his ideas from.
It's the idea of maliciousanimal magnetism, mesmerism as
(45:44):
it was also called, the ideathat you can exert this mental
power on people and they willfall under your spell.
In earlier generations it wascalled magic.
It's just this idea of thisstrange force, this power that
people can have, and the realityis that you have to be able to
(46:06):
confront things, as Hubbard says.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Right, you have to be able to confront things, as
hubbard says, and right, and ashe alleges that his ptssp
technology gives you thecapacity to confront and shatter
.
Quote-unquote suppression.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Right and shatter you know, and I I've you know, I've
had enough of it because I hada 16-year straight run of
harassment pretty much on adaily basis.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
And what became evident to me was that
Scientologists were terrified ofme.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
I had a very interesting encounter with Ken
Hoden when he was the portcaptain for Gilmore Hot Springs.
I knew Ken very well for um, Iknew ken very well.
Uh, he's.
He's the man, um, who inventedthe word unconsciousable, which
he used in an interview with bbcpanorama.
It's unconsciousable whatthey've done with my religion.
(46:59):
Okay, unconsciousable, that isa good one.
Um, that didn't see him in anymore interviews after that, but
they got mike rinder after that.
He was a lot better on camerathan Ken was, for sure, and you
could almost believe himsometimes.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Sometimes.
Yeah, If you looked past thegaunt gray skin and the vacant
eyes and the you know which, I'msure I looked the same way when
I was there, after years of notsleeping too, you know, yeah
absolutely, and you know theprimary method of control.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
as a former official at Guantanamo Bay said, sleep
deprivation is the royal routeto confession.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
It's the principal method of brainwashing.
You just don't let people sleepand you can't focus or
concentrate.
Your memory doesn't functionanymore.
So terrible and sadly normal itis.
It is terrible.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
I witnessed that personally, where a staff member
at Goldner Productions actuallywas confessing to having burned
down the film lab whereHubbard's films were made.
It was completely untouched,unscathed.
(48:18):
Anyway, it's awful, it'sabsolutely deplorable.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And it leads you into the truth.
Rundown this idea that you canconfess to absolute and complete
absurdity.
That's impossible, because Ronand David are always right and
whatever they say is true, evenif what they say is in complete
contradiction to what else theysay.
It does get really, reallyscary, doesn't it?
(48:45):
So yeah, where were we?
I'm sure we were somewhere.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah, so you were describing the events that led
up to the publication of yourbook in 1990.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah.
So they got hold of themanuscript through Dougie and
they sued me in New York.
They sued me in New York and onthe grounds that there was a
precedent set by JD Salinger,the author of Catcher in the Rye
(49:17):
.
Salinger had sued a biographerfor using quotations from
letters that he'd written thatwere in a public collection.
They were in a universitycollection and he said yes, but
I could still profit by theirpublication.
Now I could still make money bypublishing them because I still
own the copyright.
There were cases very quicklyin the um stravinsky estate and
(49:42):
the hemingway estate.
That followed on, and so yougot this brief period of history
in the US where you couldn'tpublish our style biography
using unpublished material.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Interesting.
So it's not that.
The premise was not thatanything was incorrect, it was
simply that they were letters.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yes and guardian orders.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Unpublished being the key word.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, and so there were 60 passages in the original
manuscript and that book iscalled A Piece of Blue Sky, the
original book.
The reason when I took it backand republished it, we renamed
it let's Sell these People aPiece of Blue Sky, which is the
full statement made by RonHubbard when he opened the doors
(50:32):
in April 1950 to the firstHubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation in Elizabeth, newJersey.
He turned to Don Rogers, who Iinterviewed, and said let's sell
these people a piece of bluesky.
What he was talking about, infact, was we'll sell them
meaningless memberships, we'llcall them patrons, meritorious,
or gold this or diamond that,and they'll give us money for
(50:55):
this, which they did.
History repeats itself right,it's a fundamental aspect of
Scientology the sale of status.
You know so that you're now anOT8.
What can you actually do?
Speaker 1 (51:09):
I can complain, yeah, I can move objects with my mind
.
I just cannot ever show anybodythat I can do that.
I've always had the perspective.
It's one of the most elaborateexamples of the Emperor's New
Clothes scenario that exists onthis planet.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Absolutely.
I mean probably have a copy.
Yeah, I keep a copy of it.
I only keep two Scientologybooks here so that I can refer
to them at will, and this is anactual Scientology publication.
Just so that we're clear onthat.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yep Scientology 08.
Yep 08, 0 to 8.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
0 to infinity Right, which will make the physical
universe into nothing.
And we will make you infiniteinstead of you being nothing to
nothing, and we will make youinfinite instead of you being
nothing.
And there is a very interestinglittle trap underneath that
(52:19):
concept.
The first axiom of Scientologylife is basically a static which
has no mass, no motion, nomeaning, no location in space or
in time.
You've just been defined, youare nothing.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (52:36):
You are the life static, you are the thetan.
But here we have this passage.
This is the 1970 edition.
You won't find this in any ofthe later editions, because they
realize that it might legallyget them into trouble.
But operating thetan, ot course, section eight, capital letters
(52:58):
, description ability to be atcause, knowingly and at will,
over thought, life, form, matter, energy, space and time.
Subjective and objective.
So if you want to make thingsdisappear and appear, you can do
it.
Yep, objective, not justsubjective, you will have the
(53:19):
ultimate superpowers.
Doesn't seem to have happenedand usually when you ask, it's
like they'll tell you they canchange traffic lights and move
clouds.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
So what I used to do in.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
And anticipate phone calls.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Anticipate phone calls.
The phone will ring sometime,yes, so I used to do this little
thing, which was thepresumption that I must.
If I speak publicly, there willbe exterior Scientologists
watching me, of course,inevitably because they've got
to monitor my progress, and sowhat I used to do is put a
little bit of tinfoil on thetable and say if this tinfoil
(53:56):
moves just one inch during thecourse of the talk, then we all
know that Scientology worksNever moved.
There you go.
Moving clouds, you'd changetraffic lights.
Oh, come on.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
It's just hokum and Emperor's New Clothes.
This thought that from February1952 onward, when he started
promising I mean in 1950, he'spromising you'll be immune to
viruses, you'll never catch acold again.
That's a good one.
You'll have a perfect memoryand, of course, that didn't
really work and you'll beemotionally, you know cheery at
(54:32):
all times.
Speaker 1 (54:33):
Right, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
And there were what?
272 people that this hadalready been done to, according
to Modern Science of MentalHealth, none of whom has ever
come forward?
Not one, yeah.
None of whom has ever comeforward?
Not one, yeah.
And when, of course, soniabianca the clear did appear at
the shine auditorium in august1950, she couldn't remember the
(55:00):
color of his tie when he turnedhis back let alone the physics
formulae from her degree.
So, right, yeah.
But he then went on to promisethese supernatural abilities,
and as yet, how on earth did hemanage to do this?
That people would keep onbelieving him up until well now
(55:23):
and and pay out hundreds ofthousands, even millions, of
dollars?
Right, the promise, and thereis.
There are answers to thatquestion and, as I'm writing a
book about that at the moment,that this has happened
throughout history.
Hubbard said that his favoritebook was 12 Against the Gods by
(55:43):
William Belytho, and it alwayssurprised me that kind of go go,
look, this is Ron Hubbard'sfavorite book.
You're going to read it?
Oh no, we wouldn't do that.
No, I think if it's hisfavorite book, you should
probably read it.
One of the 12 people in thereis Cagliostro, who is one of the
greatest con men in all history.
(56:04):
You know he went around thecrownces of Europe scamming them
and he is the very model forHubbard.
This is his favorite book,absolutely his favorite book.
Fairytelling, yeah, as indeedare many of his other favorite
books, like Hypnotism Comes ofAge by Wolfe and Rosenthal If
you want to understandScientology, that's a pretty
(56:25):
good one.
He'll make these casualreferences.
Or Alistair Crowley, of coursehe tells you to read Alistair
Crowley and I did, and I foundtens of things that became part
of Scientology, including thebirth engram that comes directly
from Crowley.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
Wow, yeah, I don't know.
I don't think you and I haveever talked about this, but I'm
sure you've heard of Bonnevue,the home that exists at the
headquarters.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
Barry Armstrong was putting visqueen linings into it
.
When the 22 boxes of hubbardmaterial were yeah.
Speaker 1 (57:01):
Yes and so, and of course that was renovated at a
cost of I think it was 30 somemillion dollars in the early
2000s.
But what was fascinating to meat that time is that L Ron
Hubbard's personal library,which was some 2000 books, was
(57:22):
replicated and every one ofthose books had to be purchased
and put into that home.
And that list of books I'mconfirming what you're saying
every single significant textand other ones not significant
to were absolutely on that list.
And it was fascinating to methat, as a someone born in
(57:45):
Scientology, I would neverconsider reading Freud or you
know, any of these many, manypeople that Hubbard even
references in his lectures andbooks and materials, but we
would never be allowed to readthose ourselves.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, I mean two points on that that he, of
course you know, makes the oneclaim, which is that nobody
contributed anything major andthat his, in Fundamentals of
Thought, he says that his is thefirst discovery in 50,000 years
, and that makes me wonder, well, what was it that was found
50,000 years ago that was soimportant?
Speaker 1 (58:24):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
We'll never know now.
Speaker 1 (58:31):
No, we won't he's certainly not coming back.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
He's long since uh missing in action at this point,
oh yeah, and who can blame him,given what might happen to him
if we caught him right?
But then you have these listsof people, like in eight, eight
thousand and eight that thathe's beholden to, and and Freud
pops up a number of times.
So he talks about CommanderThompson, who you know.
(58:54):
When he was 12 years old helearned the Freudian mysteries
from somebody who'd studied withFreud.
Commander Thompson didn't studywith Freud.
He did send Freud a postcardonce.
There's a postcard in the Freudarchive from Commander Thompson
.
There's a postcard in the Freudarchive from Commander Thompson
.
Russell Miller found the log ofa ship that went through the
(59:15):
Panama Canal in 1923, and RonHubbard and Commander Thompson
were aboard that ship, so it'svery likely he did meet him.
I don't think he learned muchabout the Freudian mysteries.
Having read his diaries when hewas 15 and 16, he just seemed
like a kid really wasn'tthinking deep thoughts, right.
(59:35):
The only trouble with China isthere are too many chinks there.
They could use the Great Wallas a roller coaster.
And his only comment aboutmysticism, having said he'd
studied with gurus in China,india, tibet and Mongolia, the
only comment in his handwrittendiaries is that he visited a
(59:55):
lama suri and the monks soundedlike bullfrogs.
That's it, oh boy.
But with Freud there is thatclue and there are a series of
lectures given before the FirstWorld War in Worcester,
massachusetts, by Freud and inone of them he describes the
dianetic method.
He's got counting back, he'sgot the flickering of the
(01:00:16):
eyelids, he's got charge,emotional charge.
He's got the engram, doesn'tuse the word.
But he says that this you knowwhere, hubbard.
So we see he didn't understandthe unconsciousness of the pain
stuff.
No, he's got that too.
You've pretty much got themethod.
And then Freud explains why youdon't use it.
And that's because it makes theperson more dependent, not less
(01:00:38):
dependent, on the therapist.
Makes sense.
Well, I believe Freud was anutter and total con artist.
It's been one of my studiesover the years.
But frederick crew's book aboutfreud is is exceptional and you
you find him stealing ideasfrom people.
(01:01:00):
He's.
You know when I first I leftscientology my well, hubbard
credits freud.
I'd better read some freud.
And I can remember reading thefirst paragraph of a Freud
lecture and going this is justlike Hubbard, this is a guy
who's narcissistic, he'sboasting and he's paranoid
Everybody's out to get him.
You know, it's sort of oh, thisis the same kind of temperament
(01:01:20):
Interesting.
But, nonetheless, you have thisoriginal thesis, you might call
it, which would be turned intoDianetics.
Yeah, I mean, a similar methodwas used.
There was a hypnotist calledwilliam brown, who's famous
because when agatha christiewent missing and the largest
(01:01:40):
manhunt in british history wasto try and find her, when she
turned up and said I don't knowwhat happened, I have amnesiaia,
she saw this guy, william Brown, and he used methods in the
1930s that are strangely similarto Hubbard's approach in 1950.
But yeah, so this idea, you knowthat was a lot of.
(01:02:02):
You know the research to doBlue Sky had to get into all
sorts of archives.
I had to get into all sorts ofarchives there are.
You know, I'm one of the.
I was one of the people who wasinterviewed for a book called
Religion Inc by a guy calledStuart Lamont and he interviewed
five of us to write a book.
When I checked through Blue Sky, there is material from 150
(01:02:26):
people.
Wow, but most of the materialcomes from Hubbard.
Yeah, as you've seen in readingit.
It's just you don't have tomake anything up.
No, he was two years old, fouryears old or six years old when
he became a blood brother of theBlackfoot people.
(01:02:47):
I was in a deposition withKendrick moxon, toxic moxon, um,
one of the 38 unindictedco-conspirators, along with ron
hubbard in the mary suitcase.
Yes, and I had a couple ofinteresting days with with him
in this deposition and he hepushed this thing across.
He said you say that ronhubbard was not a blood brother
(01:03:08):
of the Blackfoot.
Here is a letter on theletterhead of the Blackfoot
people by a member of the tribalcouncil saying that he was.
And I didn't even look at it.
I said it's tree many feathers,isn't it?
And he wasn't a member of thetribal council.
And he pulled the thing backand looked at it and went.
(01:03:30):
Looked he went, oh no, he's noton the letter tree many
feathers.
If you look to los angelestimes of june 1990, he's
interviewed and he says I'm aneighth blood raccoon.
I found out that there was.
There were no records, so I hada ceremony and made him a blood
brother.
Wow, to two or three pointsthere that the tribal historian
(01:03:55):
said we'd never made a bloodbrother and the deputy chief of
the tribe said you know, there'sno such thing and indeed I
don't believe any NativeAmerican group have ever made a
blood brother.
It's a Viking myth thatHollywood imported in the 1920s
(01:04:17):
and 30s.
But Hubbard quite liked theidea, evidently, and you kind of
go.
So they made you a full-bloodbrave at the age of two.
That is a little fanciful, isn'tit?
That one I did trace down, andthis was the nature of the
research, to try and find outanything and everything.
Every story he told has sometiny little grain of truth in it
(01:04:37):
.
So what was the connection withthe blackfoot people?
His aunt, as I say, margaretroberts said never heard of them
.
Don't know what that's about.
I finally I got a map hereferences.
He gets the date wrong.
I think he calls it the 1910edition of the encyclopedia
britannica.
It's actually 1911 or it's theother way around.
(01:04:58):
One suddenly arrived in abookshop and he scrunched 38
volumes for five pounds, the,the, the one he'd used.
In that britannica there is amap of the reservations of the
Pecun people and you see thatthe train line that took him
(01:05:18):
from his place of birth, tilden,nebraska, at six months old,
through to Helena Montana goesthrough a Blackfoot reservation.
Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
Oh my gosh, and that's the sliver of truth.
Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
Yeah, wow, that there were Blackfoot people begging
on the station.
You know, by this time they'dbeen completely and absolutely
devastated.
Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
And so I imagine that his mum told him something
about how they were on thestation there and he fabricated
this story.
I mean looking at his teenagediaries and how he studied with
gurus in the East and thenseeing what actually happened.
And I think there's a dianeticaxiom where he basically says
(01:06:06):
there is no such thing ascreativity.
You're always working withsomething that's happened and
changing and expanding it, andit's no.
I don't think so.
I think there are people who'vebrought new things into the
world.
Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
But he was describing his own process.
Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Right.
Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Which was that he just stole ideas from people and
expanded them.
And you look at any of thethings he did, like the um
alaskan radio experimentalexpedition, where, um, what
actually happened?
And there's a book, um,published by scientology, of
photographs of ketchikan, alaskayeah, and it shows you that
(01:06:46):
what the expedition was, himspending six months stranded in
Ketchikan, appearing on theradio station there, where he
was much loved, and not actuallydoing any hydrographic charting
or anything of that type,because his catch, the boat, the
magician, had broken down andso he sat there and that becomes
(01:07:07):
that story.
And you look at, you know, Ianalyzed all of the claims that
he made, the Caribbean motionpicture expedition and that one
was freaky because the denialsof the success of that are
articles written by Hubbard atthe time.
So he's saying we didn't achieveanything.
(01:07:27):
Yeah, didn't have any piratebattles at all, which is what
they've been meant to be doing,but we did provide valuable
research for the US HydrographicDepartment.
Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Sure Fascinating.
Well, thank you for all of youramazing extensive research into
all of this and I absolutelyhave been thoroughly enjoying
rereading your book and itcertainly helped me to unravel
things when I first read it 14years ago.
So I did want to comment beforewe wrap up.
(01:08:02):
I found it interesting.
I'd forgotten this, but you're.
I've been asked before if ourpaths crossed which you know I
was seven at asked before if ourpaths crossed, which I was
seven years old, or seven oreight when you got out of
Scientology.
So not much path crossing at StHill.
But I found it interesting thatactually you were at Manchester
(01:08:24):
Org when both of my parentswere there working as staff in
the late 70s.
Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
Interesting.
What's your maiden name?
Ward Ward.
Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Yeah.
And your parents' first namesGraham and Jen G-E-N.
Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Yeah, I remember Jen Ward.
I remember the name, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
Crazy, right, small, small world.
Anyway, one last question foryou before we wrap up, and I
would love to do more with you,because your wealth of knowledge
is just stunning.
What would you tell aScientologist or a current
under-the-radar Scientologist toencourage them to read this
book?
Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
I don't even think it's the right book to read.
I think that it might be toofrightening.
So my approach would be more toparallel and to show the person
something that's notthreatening.
So Scientology is not mentionedin it at all and there are a
(01:09:39):
number of very in fact there area lot of very good ex-member
accounts from groups.
Ex-member accounts from groupsPerhaps Sarah Edmondson's book
about her experience with NXIVM.
Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
Yes.
I'll be interviewing Sarah nextweek.
Interestingly enough that youmentioned that.
Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
Give her my regards.
Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
I will, I absolutely will.
Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
It's a while since we last spoke, but also, you know,
looking at it, it's sort ofunderstanding that this is about
us being human.
It's not about there beinganything special about any
particular group.
Yeah, all of the groups use thesame techniques.
(01:10:33):
Scientology uses nearly all ofthem.
So if you went toTranscendental Meditation and I
did a lot of research on themand there are a couple of videos
on my channel with Pat Ryan andJoe Kelly who are deeply
experienced in TranscendentalMeditation and I take it it's a
negative group.
I do not have a positivefeeling about it at all.
But there and looking at thingslike that videos about things
(01:11:00):
but with TranscendentalMeditation you've got two
techniques.
You know you've got repeatingthe name of a demon or deity
over and over again until yourhead wobbles Not a form of
meditation that I recommend.
I think anything that inducesan altered state in that way is
actually harmful, even though itcan blank out the anxiety
(01:11:25):
you're feeling about otherthings.
I think meditation should be afocusing of attention, not a
blowing away of attention.
Right, um, I recommend the useof music.
Personally, I think you needsomething that's moving rather
than staring at things.
So it's a nice, nice gentlemusic, bit of renaissance
polyphony or a bit of indianclassical music, um, but I I
(01:11:48):
think meditation is a good idea,but you've got that technique
or you've got the, thelevitation technique of tm.
Um, I interviewed a woman whenI was researching a book on tm
which I didn't do in the end whohad fractured her coccyx by
doing that, which is an awfullypainful thing to do and will be
painful for the rest of yourlife.
(01:12:08):
Um, transcendental meditationpaid her somewhere over a
hundred thousand dollars, not totalk about it anymore.
Um, when I first met pat ryanback in 91, he had tunnel vision
from all the meditation he'ddone, you know, and I was very
happy.
I didn't see him for years,very happy the next time I saw
him that that that had nowchanged.
(01:12:30):
But you have to be careful withthese things.
But just two techniques.
Scientology actively has morethan 2 000 techniques, right,
and if you start from thebeginning and work on up, there
might be as many as 10 000.
And one of the implants thatScientology uses is to frighten
(01:12:52):
you about the idea of hypnotism.
Yep, this is not hypnotism.
Well, of course Hubbard doesadmit that it is hypnotism in
science of survival.
He cancels the technique usedfor Dianetics because it's
hypnotic.
You'll see a fluttering of theeyelids.
This is a sign of somebodygoing into the very lightest
(01:13:12):
level of trance, hubbard says in1951.
Then it's brought back in 1977.
Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
With the book one that Hubbard Dianetic Auditors
course.
So yeah, I mean, let me thinkabout it and I'll think about
some other particularrecommendations.
I think video is very goodWatching again with NXIVM
Seduced or the Vow, some of thematerial about Rajneesh.
(01:13:43):
Because if people think thatyou know, if you're going to
their confirmation bias their myside bias, so you're
questioning what they believe in, there's resistance immediately
, whereas if you're sort ofgoing well, these are things
that people do, and I mean mypractice from the very beginning
(01:14:03):
.
I'm not interested inconverting anybody or
deconverting anybody.
I never sat down with theintention of getting somebody to
leave Scientology or leave thebeliefs of Scientology.
I always sit down with theperspective of I want this
person to have more and betterinformation that they can check
(01:14:25):
and verify and more control overtheir own thinking.
Because Because the problem isand it happens in all cultures
and at all times that we thinkwithin the constraints that are
laid upon us and to beindependent in our thinking is
extremely difficult to develop ahealthy skepticism about all
(01:14:47):
things, be willing to, you know,agreeably challenge anything
and everything.
So you know, I find that I haverobust and good conversations
with people of all sorts ofbelief.
I was visiting a friend thisweek who's a theologian and I
(01:15:07):
don't believe what he believesand he doesn't believe what I
believe, except that we bothbelieve that we should be
compassionate, that we should bedecent in our behavior towards
other people and that it's okayfor us to talk about anything.
My friend, christian Sherco, isalso a theologian and we've
(01:15:29):
known each other since 1987.
We've never had a disagreementand I have challenged and
questioned ideas in the NewTestament with him and he's very
happy to talk about it.
Nice, you know which is theplace we ought to get to that.
Robert Thouless, pretty much theinventor of critical thinking
and also a significant member ofthe British Society for
(01:15:52):
Psychical Research in the 1970s.
So there you go.
But Thouless said if somebodygets upset while they're talking
about something, they're notrational.
So that thing of not upsettingpeople and giving them something
that's helpful to help themexpand the way they think, maybe
(01:16:18):
you know, I'm looking at itright now.
So the compilation of work fromRobert J Lifton called Losing
Reality that is an excellentbook and Lifton is one of the
most important thinkers of thegeneration he's still alive,
aged nearly 100.
And his work on thought reformin China, showing that there are
(01:16:43):
these eight paths we'vementioned.
Loaded language, language thatconfines your thinking.
He was interested to see that,as in the late 70s the
countercult world developed,that his ideas were being used
to say well, this is what thesegroups do.
(01:17:04):
So I think, looking at thingslike the cult of confession
within that, in terms of so forsomebody who's leaving, or to
help somebody to leave, givingthem material that shows that
there are such things in theworld once they've left yes,
blue sky.
Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Yes, for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
And barefaced messiah .
Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
Yes, 100%.
Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
And probably Mark's book as well, because it's the
funniest book about Scientology.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
Yes, and to wrap up, as we discussed at the beginning
, I will have four copies of APiece of Blue Sky.
Let's sell these people a pieceof blue sky signed by yourself.
Thank you so much for thatagreement, for for that um
(01:17:54):
agreement and um.
So for anyone who's watchingthis video, uh, we just ask that
you comment, ask any questionsyou'd like for future
discussions and I will be givingthose out to this community,
because there's a lot of amazingpeople interested in this topic
and um who could benefit fromreading the book, I think think
yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:18:09):
And if you want to explain Scientology to somebody
who's never been involved in it,I wrote a little book called
Scientology Cult of Greed.
Yes, and it's just the bulletpoints.
You know, but you've got theact.
You know where, in 1947, whereL Ron Hubbard asks for
psychiatric treatment, theletter is reprinted in the book,
(01:18:30):
so you can see his own wordsabout his suicidal inclinations
and how messed up he was at thevery moment he's claiming to
have developed this technique.
Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
Interesting, yeah, fascinating.
Well, thank you so much.
As always, john, it's been avery interesting, fascinating
conversation for me as well, soI always learn new things when
talking with you.
So thank you so much for yourtime and I hope to speak to you
again soon, yeah that'd be great, thanks so much Awesome.
(01:19:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
Thanks for watching.
If you'd like to help supportthe channel, feel free to check
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You can also pick up a copy ofmy book Blown for Good Behind
(01:19:26):
the Iron Curtain of Scientologyin hardback, kindle and audible
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There's also a link to ourpodcast, and you can get that on
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(01:19:47):
the subscribe button right here.
Thanks a lot, until next time.
And welcome back to the channel.
I am Claire Headley, your hostfor today.
This is my next episode of LifeAfter Scientology and I have
the honor of interviewing MrJohn Atack.
Welcome back, john.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hi, claire, good to see you again.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Great to have you back and today.
I appreciate you being willingto do this.
We are going to delve deep into.
Let's Sell these People a Pieceof Blue Sky, your amazing book
that I think is a critical pieceof anyone's recovery from
Scientology.
I hope you would agree withthat statement by me.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Well, that's what it was written for.
When I wrote it, I reallywasn't thinking about anybody
other than people who'd beenharmed by Scientology or
affected by Scientology, and itmeant that the writing of it was
very careful.
In fact, stacey Young, who didthe dead Agent, the attack on
(01:08):
Ben Corridan's book, when sheread it said she couldn't find
anything in it to take apart.
So I'd become aware of how theywill pick at things.
It needed to be reliable and,apart from a couple of tiny
things, there is actually anattribution to the 30th of
February which only one personhas ever commented on, and I
(01:31):
invented the word, undoubtedly.
Oh, there you go.
It's intended to kind of unpicksome of the nonsense that
Hubbard blurts into our headsblurted into our heads.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yes, yes, and so getting into the timeline, you
got into Scientology in 1974 inyour late teens, correct?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I was 19, and I think it was the 11th of December.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Oh, there you go.
You, like me, have a mindthat's clearly set on dates, to
be precise.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, isn't it interesting?
I think you're the only otherperson I've met who has this
thing about.
Oh, what was the exact momentthis happened?
Yes, having done all of thatdate locating in Scientology
you'd have thought these peoplewould be good at it, but they
aren't.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
No, no.
Well, you know we'll get intothat, but I think when you start
to blur facts and disregardfacts to get along and toe the
line, then you know a lot ofthings can get warped in
perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Absolutely, absolutely.
And when you use a system thatactually induces false memories
and teaches you how to inventthings, then that can really
mess with people's ability toremember things properly.
And for me, part of it is thatI did deliberately reconstruct
my memory towards the end of mytime in Scientology and having
left Scientology, because I'dbeen led to believe that my
(03:12):
memory was in some way damagedwhile I was in Scientology and I
came to realize it was probablya little bit better than most
people's in fact, and theremight be something a bit
autistic about the dates, Idon't know probably in my case
too, who knows?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
um.
Okay, so 1974 to 1983, and Ifound it interesting again, um,
that your path out was throughthe independent Scientologist
movement.
Mine was not, and I think thata big difference there from my
(03:51):
perspective is simply that I wasborn into Scientology.
So it was never a choice for mepersonally, and I've always
been of the view that when itbecame a choice, ie after I had
been declared a suppressiveperson and I was never going to
be afforded the opportunity tospeak to my family ever again
(04:12):
anyway, then the burden ofhaving to, you know, remain in
the belief system because of theleverage they had over me.
They had already, you know,burned that.
So it became my own personalchoice, at which point I was
(04:33):
done and walked away.
And but I've seen many peopleand I'd love to get your comment
on this who, when they leave,they do they, they have in their
mind.
It seems to me that they'vecouched it in such a way that,
well, they're no longer part ofthe organization, but they still
(04:53):
believe in Hubbard's writings.
So, before I ask you your viewson this, my view on this is
that that has a lot to do withthe deep programming and
language associated withScientology, because if they no
longer believe, then they're asuppressive person, or there's
(05:14):
all these labels that go alongwith that, or there's all these
reasons that Scientology andHubbard specifically
manufactured that explain thatthat very often keep people in
for much longer.
What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I mean it fits into the general pattern of the way
we behave as human beings.
It's not exclusive in any wayto Scientology.
So the way that you trapsomebody into something is you
make them feel guilty and youmake them feel frightened.
And so the induction of guilt,the induction of phobia.
(05:51):
And with any and everyauthoritarian control group and
I personally don't think theword cult is pejorative, it just
means a group of people thatidolize a leader or a doctrine,
but we are careful with the Cword so with any authoritarian
(06:15):
sect you'll find that there isthe fear of what will happen to
you when you leave, that youwill decline.
You know that you will decline.
In many of the pseudo-Christiansects the idea is that, hey,
you'll go to hell, you'll bedamned.
(06:35):
Now the Moonies go one muchbetter than this.
Not only will you be damned,but all of your ancestors will
be damned.
And that gets kind ofcomplicated when you realize
that we have common ancestors.
So I don't know how far backthat's meant to go.
But then you have groups wherepeople are told that they'll
suffer accidents.
I have a friend of mine,christian Sherko, who's a
brilliant counselor, and he hada case where somebody she'd left
(07:00):
the building where the groupwas, but she didn't dare cross
the road because she was surethat she'd be hit by a car.
Wow, so you have thesemechanisms functioning and then,
as you say, you have the loadedlanguage, the language trap,
whereby and Hubbard's verycarefully done this thing it's
about the words, it's not aboutthe context of the words.
(07:22):
So conceptual understanding iswho knows what that is in
Scientology?
You're meant to just understandwhat the words mean, and he
then gives you two 600-pagedictionaries of definitions,
which are often contradictory.
So if you look up Q&A, forexample in a Hubbard thing,
you've got these variousdifferent meanings of it and
(07:46):
sometimes it becomespreposterous.
So, for example, a tiger is afailed staff member and Hubbard
said it's a tough universe andonly the tigers survive.
And that could be true.
And people, we become lockedinside the concepts that are
underneath the words, and peoplewill often then brush the word
(08:08):
off the top, so they'll stopsaying dev t or something like
that um, which is the one thatthe people often hold on to
curiously yeah, no, I I stillhonestly have not found a good
substitute for that word.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
No.
I was doing Developed trafficbecause it's such a broad it
covers so many things in onebucket that it's hard to find an
equivalent in the real worldlanguage.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, we'll do a show about that sometime.
Okay, but it is that one is2015.
I met Nancy Manning and shesaid there is just this one word
I can't get rid of.
And I said DevT.
And she went how did you knowthat?
So yeah, there are alternatives, but we won't get into that
(09:04):
because I can't think of themoffhand that's okay yeah,
messing about you know andnonsense stuff, that that's a
waste of time wasting.
There are all sorts of thingsthat go around.
It developed unnecessarytraffic and you can actually
develop it further to the dev otoh yeah yeah, so the devotees
(09:26):
of scientology developedunnecessary operating thetans or
devotees.
um, it can be used in differentways.
So, and there's a wholeconstruction of thought.
Um, I'm working on a book atthe moment which is based on the
premise that absurd beliefs canlead to atrocious behaviors.
(09:46):
And, looking at one set ofideas after another, if you
start to believe these things,then it becomes inevitable that
you will behave in certain ways.
And in Scientology, a goodexample my late dear friend,
shona Foxness, came to me manyyears ago and she said why are
(10:08):
you wasting your time doing allof this stuff with
Scientologists?
They pulled it in and I'm kindof that was a bit more Irish
inflected there.
That wasn't very good, but theypulled it in and I kind of
looked at her and said Shona, soif a four year old is just
about to go underneath the bus,you're not going to stop them
because they pulled it in.
And I kind of looked at her andsaid Shona, so if a
four-year-old is just about togo underneath the bus, you're
not going to stop them becausethey pulled it in.
(10:29):
This idea, this idea of karma,vipaka, action-reaction, that
we're all caught up in thisthing, that we're suffering the
consequences of our past actions, which is an absurd nonsense.
Which is an absurd nonsense.
It's not possible for auniverse with even if they were,
just if the only living thingsin the universe were the things
(10:50):
on this planet, let alone theother hundred billion galaxies
or whatever, then every time agiant clam gives birth, it has
two billion little babies, andthe idea that there's somebody
writing down the karma of all ofthese things and making sure
that the right moment arrivesfor 417 people to die in an air
(11:13):
crash.
The mathematics just becomesimpossible.
But it's a great way ofcontrolling people, saying
everything that happens to youis your fault and it's because
you've been bad that bad thingshappen.
And it's so much a part of ourculture since Christian science,
which is where Hubbard got itfrom, and it becomes the secret,
the law of attraction, therules, prosperity, christianity,
(11:37):
this idea that you can somehowcontrol reality from this little
node of being.
If there are eight billion ofus, just as humans, doing that,
let alone the other species, itall becomes so incredibly
complicated.
But you can make people feelguilty and you can make them
feel frightened.
And so I mean, it is fair tosay, conway and Siegelman, who
(12:02):
wrote an excellent articlecalled Information Disease,
which is the first thing that Iever read about thought reform,
mind control, many, many yearsago.
But they also wrote a bookcalled Snapping and in it they
say that Scientology may havethe most debilitating set of
rituals of any cult in America,and they wrote that in 1990.
(12:26):
Here we are the dates again.
And in 2014 I wrote somethingfor tony ortega saying you know,
I don't think they interviewedenough people, and tony, being
tony, of course, published thisto embarrass me at great good
friend and and wrote conway andsiegelman and they said no, we
interviewed 33 Scientologists,you know.
(12:48):
So we got some idea.
So I wrote to them.
I was in touch with them forthe first time and said you know
, you said that you think thatwith the Krishnas or the Moonies
, it takes three to six monthsbefore somebody recovers, but
with Scientology, you reckon ittakes 12 and a half years
without assistance.
And I said you've had time tothink about it now.
Would you agree with me thatmost people, having left
(13:10):
Scientology without assistance,won't recover?
And they agreed with me.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, I completely agree with that as well, I do.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
It's just so invasive and there's nothing else quite
like it.
You come to have a completelydifferent internal reality to
any other people around you.
You're viewing the world interms of, you know, suppressive
persons and engrams and goals,problems, masters and locks and
secondaries, and just this hugevocabulary of material that is
(13:48):
fanciful and fabulized.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, and in my case and I think anyone born into
Scientology would agree withthis I learned the language of
Scientology concurrent tolearning the English language,
so for all intents and purposesit was a first language, even
(14:12):
without the context.
So you know, some of myearliest memories included
statements like stop being banky.
I had no idea what thederivation any.
I'd never read Dianetics, I'dnever even knew what the
reactive bank was.
But I came to understand as afour-year-old child what banky
(14:33):
meant.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, a few years ago I wrote something for
Tony Otega and had a remarkableemail from I don't remember who
it was, but somebodyex-Scientology kids and I'd said
something about thesloganeering in Scientology and
the way that you have all ofthese thought-terminating
clichés, these ways of make itgo right, all of this kind of
(14:57):
stuff, and that many of them arenegative.
And within days they talked totheir various members and I
think they sent me a list of 350put downs from the scientology
literature and I looked I sawthat.
I saw that, I remember that yeah, and the next week I think
they'd added another hundred.
(15:18):
It just kept on going and itwas a remarkable piece of work
and something that that reallyshould be published and
republished, because howabsolutely horrible.
You know all of these ways ofundermining people and
controlling them, and of course,hubbard isn't shy about this.
He admits that Scientology is away of controlling people.
(15:41):
He admits it again and againand again.
You want to have 8C, you wantto have infinite control.
And when you do the upperindoctrination training routines
lovely use of the word therewhich are actually written by L
Ron Hubbard Jr and the wordjunior was tip-exed out after he
left and he says that whathappened was they were doing one
(16:03):
of their advanced clinicalcourses in in the 50s and his
dad said we've got rowdystudents, we've got to work out
ways of controlling them.
And he came up with the upperindoctrination training routines
, where you learn how to showanother person that you can
control their reactive mind sothey might be able to control it
.
Right, but you move into thisstep without thinking about it,
(16:25):
where these days in our societyto grab hold of somebody and
move them physically is nolonger considered polite.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Right.
And make them do something,regardless of whether they want
to or not.
Yeah, enforcing compliance, etcetera yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And you're teaching both sides of it, because you're
teaching how to controlsomebody, but you're also
teaching the person how tosubmit correct how to give in.
And so you get this wholebizarre thing.
You know this idea that staringat people will make them feel
more comfortable in some way.
It's like the police and themilitary use this technique to
control people.
It's a dominance techniqueRight Beautifully demonstrated,
(17:10):
of course, by Charles Manson oneof the world's more famous
Scientologists.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yes, completely.
So back to your book.
So you got out in 1984 and werebriefly… October the 18th 1983.
There we go.
Okay, 83, sorry, 74 to 83,right, that's it.
And so when did you tell me howthe what your path was to then
(17:37):
embark on writing this book inthe first place?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I think it was really down to meeting Captain Bill
Robertson that you know, and fora couple of weeks I believed
the crazy nonsense that he wasspreading around.
I came to know him pretty wellbecause he lived in East
Grinstead for eight months and Ialways got on very well with
him.
But he was obviously out of hismind and he watched me leave
(18:03):
Scientology and kind of go Idon't want to do any of it, and
he was so baffled that anybodycould possibly want to do this.
So it started with him becausehe arrived and that's why
October the 18th in my mind, I,three days before he was due to
speak at the Grand Hotel in EastGrinstead, a guy called Bevan
Priest came to me, woke me up Ihave a sleep late, I have a
(18:27):
delayed sleep wake phase and Iwoke up with this guy standing
by the bed, saluting me andasking me if I'd host this
meeting, and so I was obviouslysleepy.
So I said, yeah, all right.
And I get to the meeting and Ifind out I've been appointed the
chairman of the OperatingThetan Committee, uk, which was
brilliant.
Yeah, all right.
And I get to the meeting and Ifind out I've been appointed the
uh, chairman of the operatingthetan committee, uk, which was
(18:49):
was brilliant.
You know.
It's like wow.
I had no idea what that meant.
I had no idea that I've beenappointed this by captain bill
robertson.
He was the second deputycommodore of scientology and
therefore, with hubbard, afterthe picture of mary sue out of
the picture, he was technicallythe head of the Sea Organisation
, which is an interestingthought.
With him gone, I'm technicallythe head of Scientology now.
(19:10):
I think so if they'd like totransfer the bank accounts over
now, we can start giving themoney back.
But so I host this meeting andfind myself in the middle of
this thing going.
What happened?
And I started a newslettercalled Reconnection, most of
(19:30):
which is available on somewebsite.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
Yes, around 33 issues.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I haven't heard of that.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Ah, well, there you go.
Well, it's before your time,Claire.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yes, very much so.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
A little whippersnapper when I did this,
but it was really those of uswho were disaffected, which was
about half the membership.
Internationally there mighthave been as many as 40,000.
I don't think it's ever gonemuch beyond that and half of us
(20:09):
left and quite a lot of peoplejust that was them done with it.
But some of us still had thisfervor.
We still believed that this wasthis wonderful world-saving
medicine that was going to, youknow, liberate humanity, and so
we invested ourselves absolutelyand thoroughly in it.
I, I was that person.
(20:31):
I I was making sure I wasfighting, holding off the
attacks from the mother cultagainst the independent groups,
and we were among the firstpeople to talk about independent
scientology.
Back then.
It was certainly the first everpublic meeting in the uk of
disaffected yeah, about 60 of usthere, I think.
(20:52):
Yeah.
But I started meeting peopleand talking to people captain
bill's, the first one who hadtheir stories to tell me.
And, captain bill, his storywas that ron hubbard was dead,
he was on the mothership and hewas telepathically communicating
with Bill who wrote things downwhich he called sector
(21:12):
operations bulletins, SOBs, andthey were handwritten.
Wasn't it, though you know,sometimes the unconscious
reflection does happen.
The Freudian slip Right andthese were handwritten.
It looked exactly likehubbard's handwriting, except
(21:33):
for the capital a's.
They weren't, but I, I couldn'tyou know who was this person,
and they were signed astarparmegian and um I fat, you know
.
Bill then gave me a copy ofHubbard's script, or Suzette's
reworking of Hubbard's Revolt inthe Stars, which is the OT3
(21:57):
period is meant to be.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And Suzette being one of Hubbard's children.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
That's right.
One of the seven children thathe had by his three wives and
one of the six children who leftScientology one way or another
and Revolting the Stars, wasmeant to be set around 75
million years ago the evilgalactic, prince Xenu and all
(22:24):
this stuff, and in it there's acharacter called Astar Parmegian
and Astar Parmegian.
And Astar Parmegian is anightclub singer who is in love
with Elron Elray, and you canguess who Elron Elray might have
been.
And I later found out fromBill's girlfriend, who was a
close friend of mine, who livedwith him for eight months, that
(22:50):
he would take her to outside hisclothing stores on a Saturday
and point out the things hewanted, and then, at eight
o'clock every evening, if he hadnothing else to do, he'd put a
ball gown on and high heeledshoes.
Now Bill was six foot four andbig.
He'd been a Mississippimotorcycle cop, I was told, and
he would sing songs to El Ron ElRey.
(23:12):
So he was my first.
You know, it's like I got whathe said and it was like I don't
think his explanation of whathappened to Scientology is
correct, and I started talkingto people because I wanted to
know.
So the origin of the book is is,uh, an article I wrote for the
secondary connection that wascalled so what really happened
(23:36):
in which I tried to get how thecommodore's messenger
organization david miscavige,pat broker had taken over, how
the guardian's office had gone,how how the mission holders
conference had destroyed in asingle blow this very prosperous
and really the way that peoplewere recruited in Scientology.
(23:58):
It was just blown up and peoplewere coming out you know, david
Mayo's people were coming over,john Nelson, harvey Haber, who
both worked with Hubbard, andthey were telling me stories and
from there it just becamenecessary to collect all of this
together.
And originally I wrote a bookcalled the Scientology War which
(24:19):
was about Captain Bill and hisideas.
And then I realized nobody willunderstand this without
understanding Scientology.
So I then had to do a historyof Scientology and that was like
, well, they're not going to getthis without understanding
Scientology.
So I then had to do a historyof Scientology and that was like
, well, they're not going to getthis without, because they're
going to look at this and gowell, what kind of lunatic would
believe this nonsense, frankly.
So I had to put in my own storyto say, well, you know, I
(24:41):
didn't know about Xenu and thebody thetans.
Until I've been involved forseven years, it initially seemed
like a practical form oftherapy.
I read Science of Survival tostart with and it just, you know
, you didn't take.
You tried not to pay too muchattention to things like history
of man, where Hubbard's, youknow, talking about us all being
(25:02):
descended from clams and itbeing a cold-blooded and factual
account of our last 60 trillion, 73 trillion or 76 trillion
years, according to which partof the book you're reading.
I'm happy to say Miscavige hascorrected it all to 76 trillion,
but the first edition Hubbardcouldn't quite make up his mind
about how many trillion yearsthere have been, and that's a
long time given that we're in auniverse that's only 14 billion
(25:27):
years old.
So trillions, that's very big.
And so I wrote lots of articlesand I started to look at all of
the contradictions in Hubbard'sown biographies.
I collected 22 biographies thatwere copyrighted to Hubbard so
(25:48):
it's his responsibility and Irealized that no two of them
were the same.
And then along the way, quiteearly on in fact, I saw work
gathered by a journalist whocalled himself Michael Lynn
Shannon, and years later, whenOmar Garrison, who was the
official biographer of Hubbardwhen he was being harassed by
(26:10):
Scientology and turned up on mydoorstep to talk to me, he would
not believe that I'd not hadaccess to the Hubbard archive or
interviewed Jerry Armstrong.
But I hadn't.
There was enough materialavailable and I got involved
with other people who areresearchers and there was no
(26:31):
worldwide web.
So if I needed something fromthe montana historical society I
had to write them a letter andI got all of hubbard's navy
records.
I was the first person after hedied to get the navy, the fbi,
the veterans administrationrecords, um.
And by that time I was workingwith Russell Miller on his
(26:51):
barefaced Messiah, and Blue Skywas already pretty much done.
When Russell came along he wasprobably the highest-paid
journalist in the UK.
He was working at the SundayTimes and they commissioned him
to find Ron Hubbard.
This was in January 86.
And he came to me and said well, you know, can I hire you as a
(27:13):
researcher?
Here's £2,000.
I was like, oh, somebody wantsto give me money for doing this.
Incredible.
And because I just couldn't geta publisher, I'd written to 50
publishers.
11 of them came back and saidthey'd like to do the book, but
they understood that thelitigation would mean they
couldn't make any profit from it.
Neville Spearman.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
And sorry, what year was this?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
The original.
So January 86 is when Russellcame to me and I'd been putting
a manuscript around for abouttwo years then.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Okay, so 84 to 86.
And so when Russell came to you, you'd already had publishers
even back then saying theydidn't want to publish because
of the litigious approach ofScientology to any such books.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yes, and Neville Spearman, who ran Neville
Spearman Publishers and hadpublished the Mindbenders by
Cyril Vosper.
He wrote back to me a personalletter and I got the idea of
this guy in his 70s in hisSavile Row suit with his public
school accent, writing back tome and he explained it to me in
(28:26):
the letter.
He said you know, I'd love topublish the book but there is no
money to be made.
Um the mind benders sold 108000 copies and um most of that
money was lost in litigation.
Wow.
And he signed himself off deathto the evil cult, which I was
(28:47):
quite something, but I'd givenup.
I couldn't find a publisher andso I gave Russell my manuscript
.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I see.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And Barefaced Messiah and I was his researcher
through the whole 18 months ofthe project.
I was his expert witness in 87in the High Court in London.
I don't know if anybody elsealong the way.
You've probably been appointedan expert witness by now,
haven't you?
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yes, I testified in the Danny Masterson trial as an
expert witness.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah, and I think I was the first in 1987.
I don't think anybody had beenbefore and it was very
interesting to be in thatsituation where you are
considered your expertise isvalued by the court.
You know you've shown that youknow enough about the subject
(29:39):
that your opinion can be trusted.
So you're not testifying tomatters of your own experience,
you're testifying based uponwhat you know about the subject.
So we won those cases inAustralia, in the US and in
England and so sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
So were those cases before Barefaced Messiah was
published.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
They were, yes, they were, yes, the attempt to injunk
publication in Australia andEngland.
In the US strange thingshappened that the book was
published and then it waswithdrawn, Even though Henry
(30:32):
Holt the publishers had won thecase.
The judge had warned thatbecause there was unpublished
copyrighted material in the book, which had all come from me
Hubbard's diaries, his teenagediaries, letters that he'd
written, guardian's orders thathe'd authored.
Every document that wasquestioned in the book had gone
to Russell via me, including theinfamous Skipper letter, the
(30:56):
1938 letter where Hubbard sayshe doesn't believe in
immortality and his only goal isto smash his name into history.
I'd been working withresearchers and collectors and
that's just the most incredibletreasure trove of, particularly
letters like the 10th April 53letter to Helen O'Brien where he
(31:21):
asks what she thinks of thereligion angle, which was a
fairly straightforward admissionon its part, and he says he
needs to be, fairly deeplyprophetic when you look at the
subsequent, where we are now?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Holy moly yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Isn't it, though?
And you know I mean that's awhole other subject.
As a Scientologist, I neverthought of Scientology as a
religion.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Me neither.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And it only became a big thing with people not being
conscripted to go to Vietnam,and so they'd take a one week
minister's course, and nowthey're exempt Right, and I know
that because I talked withpeople who'd successfully dodged
the draft by doing this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
And even then thereafter, it still wasn't
positioned or discussed as areligion, at least in my
experience growing up in it.
I never considered it areligion until 1993, after the
IRS exemption.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah, and I mean I got into a little bit of a of a
barney with janet reitman whenshe was working on inside
scientology, because she wroteto me and asked for my help and
I said, well, yeah, there areconditions.
The first is you don't tellanybody.
I'm working with you becauseI've been steamrolled and I
don't want to be harassedanymore.
And the second is a note thatyou call it the church and, um,
(32:51):
it isn't right.
And she came back with thisgreat defensive.
But there are people who reallydo believe it's a religion and
it's like no, I'm not sayingthat.
People believe it's a religion.
That's up to them.
It's not a church.
A church ecclesiast is achristian organization and
that's why he used the word andhe's conned us all into using
this per word, this friendlyword, to describe something that
(33:14):
is really not Christian.
And of course, it wasregistered by him in December 53
in Camden, New Jersey.
Have the registrations, alongwith the Church of American
Science, which is one of thelittle windows onto Hubbard's
real intentions.
Because when John Sanborn puttogether modern management
(33:35):
technology defined becauseHubbard never looked at the
things he'd written and Johnedited everything from 54 to 78,
he found a definition of theChurch of American Science and
it's in the book where it saysit's to recruit Christians and
move them on to something better, meaning Scientology, so the
word church.
There's also the Church ofHuman Engineering.
(33:56):
We still await the consequencesof that particular church.
It hasn't been activated yet,Right?
So I basically I'd written abook.
I couldn't get it published.
Russell had the manuscriptSince then Russell gave it to
Chris Owen.
He gave all of his material toChris Owen and Chris gave all of
(34:17):
his material to me.
So I've got the originaltypescript that I gave to
Russell, where Russell's crossedthings out and he's taken
chapter titles from me and he'staken whole sections um.
So probably about 50 percent ofbarefaced messiah came directly
from me wow but the other 50percent is brilliant research on
(34:37):
his part and his wife, renata,um, you know so, for example,
his interview with margaretroberts, who was hubbard's aunt
she's only eight years old wasonly eight years old and him,
from the age of six months to 12years old, he lived in the same
house as her.
And so we have this preciousinterview with this woman who
who, when she's asked well, whatabout him being a blood brother
(34:58):
with the Blackfoot Pakunipeople, she says I'm sorry, I've
never heard of that.
Um, so then, um, I mean thewriting of, so the writing of
the book was very much to.
You know where russell wasright.
He's a biographer, an exceptionbiographer he's.
(35:18):
Conan doyle is a really splendidbook, but he wrote about hefner
and getty, and so that that's,that's what he is, and so he
wrote a.
I wasn't seeking ever to writea biography.
I was seeking to say he saysthis here and he contradicts it
here, because if you want to getsomebody to the point where
they stop fanatically believingsomething, you have to use
(35:41):
cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And I will say I love the quotes that you used at the
beginning of the chaptersbecause it does.
It's such stark contrast.
You know, obviously, all of thequotes I'm familiar with, but
just the way you laid it out Ithought was very, very good and
very eye opening.
(36:03):
Thank you, anyway.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
So carry on and and that's that's also important.
The sequence with which you givesomebody information is vital,
and I decided that, for the mostpart, I would just follow a
chronology yeah um, so when thedead agent pack came out from
scientology, there were 60points in it and nearly all of
them is sort of he says thatthat Scientology was banned in
(36:30):
Victoria, australia.
In fact it was actually, andyou say, yeah, it's
chronological, that's when itwas banned.
If you read further you'll findwhen the ban was lifted, uh all
, but there were, I think therewere, three things, uh, of those
60 that weren't, that weren'tanswered within the book itself,
the other 57, they're all inthe book.
(36:52):
Very poor work.
Those three are all to do withVicky Asneran's statements,
because she, of course, havingmade those statements, said that
she'd perjured herself and, asI understand it, took an amount
of money and went away.
And I decided that she wastelling the truth in those
statements and if they wanted tosue me over that we could deal
(37:15):
with that then.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Fair enough.
Okay, so we're up to January 86.
You work with Russell Miller,so then what happens that your
book does then finally getpublished?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Oh, somewhere in early 88, late 87 in fact,
russell called me up and said hewas being followed by private
detectives and he was curious toknow if they were the same
private detectives who'd beenharassing Lyle Stewart, the
publisher who'd published BenCorridon's Elrond Hubbard,
(37:51):
messiah or Madman.
And would I ask Lyle Now Idon't actually know Lyle, but
it's fair enough.
You know, and Russell had donea story in China, he'd done a
story in Mexico, he'd done astory in Germany and there'd
been private detectivesfollowing him um, at great cost
to the Scientology parishioners,no doubt no doubt and he, so.
(38:15):
I phoned Lyle Stewart up and um.
Lyle's first statement was haveyou written a book about
Scientology?
I?
I said yes, and he said I'llpublish it.
That was the beginning of theconversation.
I later found out that anybodywho phoned him up he'd say have
(38:37):
you written a book aboutScientology?
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
And he was a rogue.
He was a guy who publishedbooks about gambling, which was
his favorite pursuit.
He published books about theIRSs, who were his favorite
target um and he basicallyultimately I didn't fare too
well from from the deal I madewith him, but I don't think that
was his fault.
He came to to england and wemet in a hotel in london.
(39:05):
He the contracts and he saidI've sold the publishing company
.
I've sold it for $12 million toa group called Carroll
Communications, but I'm stillrepresenting them.
Here are your contracts and Isign up.
And the guy who bought thecompany, Steve Schragis.
He had no idea what he'd boughthimself into.
(39:26):
And of course we're, then uh,before the book's published.
Now, on the lead up to that,this guy, dougie uh, came along
um driving a rolls royce, um,with his initials on it um on
the license plate and said oh,you know, I'm really rich and
(39:47):
and I want to help you publishthis book about Scientology.
This went on for about sixmonths and I very foolishly let
him have a copy of themanuscript, and then I was sued.
Now we tracked him down.
He was a private detective.
The Rolls-Royce was hired, Justhappened to have his initials
(40:11):
under the license plate Wow.
And he managed to entrap CyrilVosper in a kidnapped
deprogramming in Germany.
And before we went off toGermany, Cyril told me that he
was going to go off there andsomebody was going to be
kidnapped.
(40:31):
And I said you must not do that.
This is a dreadful thing to doand I would never and have never
approved of such things andit's utterly counterproductive
and unnecessary.
You don't lock doors on people.
You don't shut people up.
You communicate with people.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right, that's what Scientology.
Don't shut people up.
You communicate with people,right, that's what Scientology
does is lock people up, and sodefinitely very different
methods are absolutely required.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, and they've actually, of course, were
convicted of kidnapping anddeprogramming.
In the Guardian's Office 11case, mary Sue Hubbard admitted
in her 217-page stipulation ofevidence that she had ordered
people to kidnap Michael Meisnerand that he was held, I think,
for six months and all.
But, as you say, the Corganisation.
(41:21):
The amount of human trafficking, which is, of course, something
that you were the first peopleto try and do something about,
that you and Mark, yeah, and itis a reality that people are
being trafficked, they're beingenslaved and you know that false
(41:43):
imprisonment is the least of it.
The Lisa McPherson caseexemplifies.
You know, she was not onlykidnapped, she was tied down and
when she died she had ligaturemarks on her wrists and on her
ankles, died of dehydration inthe keeping of David Miscavige.
So, yeah, absolutely terrible.
(42:05):
For me, free and opencommunication is the only way to
go.
There are no tricks, none ofhubbard's hypnotic methods,
which is, uh, something.
I mean, they're brilliant,brilliant implanting of
scientology that you makesomebody phobic about an idea.
So psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, anything
(42:25):
that has the the word psyche atthe beginning of it, you're
phobic.
You know you can't do that.
I mean, jesse Prince told methat he had a copy of Blue Sky
for six years and didn't dareopen the cover.
And you kind of go, what'sgoing to happen?
Little demons are going to flyout and take, you know, and the
(42:48):
cover.
And you kind of go.
What's going to happen?
Speaker 1 (42:49):
little demons are going to fly out and take right.
You know, I, I had the.
I had the exact same.
Uh, I did the same thing withbarefaced messiah.
I had it for about a year, twoyears, not six years, but uh,
you know it's.
It's crazy that I thought Iwould be doing something that
couldn't be undone.
And finally, and this was inthe very early days after I'd
(43:13):
escaped from Scientology and wasstill very fearful of them but
finally, in my mind at that time, I thought to myself well,
hubbard describes the quotemultiple viewpoint system, in
which you're supposed to be ableto assess and hear multiple
viewpoints, like the scenario hegives paraphrased is when
(43:36):
there's an accident, multipledifferent people see the
accident and each of theirperspectives reflects what they
saw, which might be different,but you can piece it all
together.
So I thought well, what's wrongwith reading a book?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
I mean as a Scientologist.
I read Christopher Evans' Cultsof Unreason, I read the Mind
Pendants by Vosper.
But I remember a friendbringing a copy of Inside
Scientology by Robert Kaufmanand we decided we'd hand it in
because it said it's got the OT3material in it.
(44:16):
And I later came to know RobertKaufman, who is a fascinating
and eccentric human being, butit was a very valuable book, I
think.
But it was a very valuable book, I think, and that sort of that
was something that becamesignificant to me.
(44:36):
It's like the idea of thesuppressive person that I
shouldn't talk to these peoplebecause what are they going to
do to me?
Right, you know?
And that's me admitting thatI'm weak.
When I interviewed JohnMcMaster, the world's first real
(44:57):
clear, as Hubbard named him tohis own surprise, he said that
when you know?
Because he's right there whenthe fair game doctrine is being
written in 65.
And he said he sat with Hubbardand he said well, surely if
there are these suppressivepersons, we should seek them out
and change them, transform them, because that will change the
(45:21):
world.
Why are we running away fromthem?
Why are we scared of them?
And there is an answer to that.
But the answer is.
I don't think Hubbard ever gaveit, but it's from Christian
science, where he gets certainof his ideas from.
It's the idea of maliciousanimal magnetism, mesmerism as
(45:44):
it was also called, the ideathat you can exert this mental
power on people and they willfall under your spell.
In earlier generations it wascalled magic.
It's just this idea of thisstrange force, this power that
people can have, and the realityis that you have to be able to
(46:06):
confront things, as Hubbard says.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Right, you have to be able to confront things, as
hubbard says, and right, and ashe alleges that his ptssp
technology gives you thecapacity to confront and shatter
.
Quote-unquote suppression.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Right and shatter you know, and I I've you know, I've
had enough of it because I hada 16-year straight run of
harassment pretty much on adaily basis.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
And what became evident to me was that
Scientologists were terrified ofme.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
I had a very interesting encounter with Ken
Hoden when he was the portcaptain for Gilmore Hot Springs.
I knew Ken very well for um, Iknew ken very well.
Uh, he's.
He's the man, um, who inventedthe word unconsciousable, which
he used in an interview with bbcpanorama.
It's unconsciousable whatthey've done with my religion.
(46:59):
Okay, unconsciousable, that isa good one.
Um, that didn't see him in anymore interviews after that, but
they got mike rinder after that.
He was a lot better on camerathan Ken was, for sure, and you
could almost believe himsometimes.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Sometimes.
Yeah, If you looked past thegaunt gray skin and the vacant
eyes and the you know which, I'msure I looked the same way when
I was there, after years of notsleeping too, you know, yeah
absolutely, and you know theprimary method of control.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
as a former official at Guantanamo Bay said, sleep
deprivation is the royal routeto confession.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
It's the principal method of brainwashing.
You just don't let people sleepand you can't focus or
concentrate.
Your memory doesn't functionanymore.
So terrible and sadly normal itis.
It is terrible.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
I witnessed that personally, where a staff member
at Goldner Productions actuallywas confessing to having burned
down the film lab whereHubbard's films were made.
It was completely untouched,unscathed.
(48:18):
Anyway, it's awful, it'sabsolutely deplorable.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And it leads you into the truth.
Rundown this idea that you canconfess to absolute and complete
absurdity.
That's impossible, because Ronand David are always right and
whatever they say is true, evenif what they say is in complete
contradiction to what else theysay.
It does get really, reallyscary, doesn't it?
(48:45):
So yeah, where were we?
I'm sure we were somewhere.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah, so you were describing the events that led
up to the publication of yourbook in 1990.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah.
So they got hold of themanuscript through Dougie and
they sued me in New York.
They sued me in New York and onthe grounds that there was a
precedent set by JD Salinger,the author of Catcher in the Rye
(49:17):
.
Salinger had sued a biographerfor using quotations from
letters that he'd written thatwere in a public collection.
They were in a universitycollection and he said yes, but
I could still profit by theirpublication.
Now I could still make money bypublishing them because I still
own the copyright.
There were cases very quicklyin the um stravinsky estate and
(49:42):
the hemingway estate.
That followed on, and so yougot this brief period of history
in the US where you couldn'tpublish our style biography
using unpublished material.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Interesting.
So it's not that.
The premise was not thatanything was incorrect, it was
simply that they were letters.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yes and guardian orders.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
Unpublished being the key word.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, and so there were 60 passages in the original
manuscript and that book iscalled A Piece of Blue Sky, the
original book.
The reason when I took it backand republished it, we renamed
it let's Sell these People aPiece of Blue Sky, which is the
full statement made by RonHubbard when he opened the doors
(50:32):
in April 1950 to the firstHubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation in Elizabeth, newJersey.
He turned to Don Rogers, who Iinterviewed, and said let's sell
these people a piece of bluesky.
What he was talking about, infact, was we'll sell them
meaningless memberships, we'llcall them patrons, meritorious,
or gold this or diamond that,and they'll give us money for
(50:55):
this, which they did.
History repeats itself right,it's a fundamental aspect of
Scientology the sale of status.
You know so that you're now anOT8.
What can you actually do?
Speaker 1 (51:09):
I can complain, yeah, I can move objects with my mind
.
I just cannot ever show anybodythat I can do that.
I've always had the perspective.
It's one of the most elaborateexamples of the Emperor's New
Clothes scenario that exists onthis planet.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Absolutely.
I mean probably have a copy.
Yeah, I keep a copy of it.
I only keep two Scientologybooks here so that I can refer
to them at will, and this is anactual Scientology publication.
Just so that we're clear onthat.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yep Scientology 08.
Yep 08, 0 to 8.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
0 to infinity Right, which will make the physical
universe into nothing.
And we will make you infiniteinstead of you being nothing to
nothing, and we will make youinfinite instead of you being
nothing.
And there is a very interestinglittle trap underneath that
(52:19):
concept.
The first axiom of Scientologylife is basically a static which
has no mass, no motion, nomeaning, no location in space or
in time.
You've just been defined, youare nothing.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (52:36):
You are the life static, you are the thetan.
But here we have this passage.
This is the 1970 edition.
You won't find this in any ofthe later editions, because they
realize that it might legallyget them into trouble.
But operating thetan, ot course, section eight, capital letters
(52:58):
, description ability to be atcause, knowingly and at will,
over thought, life, form, matter, energy, space and time.
Subjective and objective.
So if you want to make thingsdisappear and appear, you can do
it.
Yep, objective, not justsubjective, you will have the
(53:19):
ultimate superpowers.
Doesn't seem to have happenedand usually when you ask, it's
like they'll tell you they canchange traffic lights and move
clouds.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
So what I used to do in.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
And anticipate phone calls.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Anticipate phone calls.
The phone will ring sometime,yes, so I used to do this little
thing, which was thepresumption that I must.
If I speak publicly, there willbe exterior Scientologists
watching me, of course,inevitably because they've got
to monitor my progress, and sowhat I used to do is put a
little bit of tinfoil on thetable and say if this tinfoil
(53:56):
moves just one inch during thecourse of the talk, then we all
know that Scientology worksNever moved.
There you go.
Moving clouds, you'd changetraffic lights.
Oh, come on.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
It's just hokum and Emperor's New Clothes.
This thought that from February1952 onward, when he started
promising I mean in 1950, he'spromising you'll be immune to
viruses, you'll never catch acold again.
That's a good one.
You'll have a perfect memoryand, of course, that didn't
really work and you'll beemotionally, you know cheery at
(54:32):
all times.
Speaker 1 (54:33):
Right, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
And there were what?
272 people that this hadalready been done to, according
to Modern Science of MentalHealth, none of whom has ever
come forward?
Not one, yeah.
None of whom has ever comeforward?
Not one, yeah.
And when, of course, soniabianca the clear did appear at
the shine auditorium in august1950, she couldn't remember the
(55:00):
color of his tie when he turnedhis back let alone the physics
formulae from her degree.
So, right, yeah.
But he then went on to promisethese supernatural abilities,
and as yet, how on earth did hemanage to do this?
That people would keep onbelieving him up until well now
(55:23):
and and pay out hundreds ofthousands, even millions, of
dollars?
Right, the promise, and thereis.
There are answers to thatquestion and, as I'm writing a
book about that at the moment,that this has happened
throughout history.
Hubbard said that his favoritebook was 12 Against the Gods by
(55:43):
William Belytho, and it alwayssurprised me that kind of go go,
look, this is Ron Hubbard'sfavorite book.
You're going to read it?
Oh no, we wouldn't do that.
No, I think if it's hisfavorite book, you should
probably read it.
One of the 12 people in thereis Cagliostro, who is one of the
greatest con men in all history.
(56:04):
You know he went around thecrownces of Europe scamming them
and he is the very model forHubbard.
This is his favorite book,absolutely his favorite book.
Fairytelling, yeah, as indeedare many of his other favorite
books, like Hypnotism Comes ofAge by Wolfe and Rosenthal If
you want to understandScientology, that's a pretty
(56:25):
good one.
He'll make these casualreferences.
Or Alistair Crowley, of coursehe tells you to read Alistair
Crowley and I did, and I foundtens of things that became part
of Scientology, including thebirth engram that comes directly
from Crowley.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
Wow, yeah, I don't know.
I don't think you and I haveever talked about this, but I'm
sure you've heard of Bonnevue,the home that exists at the
headquarters.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
Barry Armstrong was putting visqueen linings into it
.
When the 22 boxes of hubbardmaterial were yeah.
Speaker 1 (57:01):
Yes and so, and of course that was renovated at a
cost of I think it was 30 somemillion dollars in the early
2000s.
But what was fascinating to meat that time is that L Ron
Hubbard's personal library,which was some 2000 books, was
(57:22):
replicated and every one ofthose books had to be purchased
and put into that home.
And that list of books I'mconfirming what you're saying
every single significant textand other ones not significant
to were absolutely on that list.
And it was fascinating to methat, as a someone born in
(57:45):
Scientology, I would neverconsider reading Freud or you
know, any of these many, manypeople that Hubbard even
references in his lectures andbooks and materials, but we
would never be allowed to readthose ourselves.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, I mean two points on that that he, of
course you know, makes the oneclaim, which is that nobody
contributed anything major andthat his, in Fundamentals of
Thought, he says that his is thefirst discovery in 50,000 years
, and that makes me wonder, well, what was it that was found
50,000 years ago that was soimportant?
Speaker 1 (58:24):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
We'll never know now.
Speaker 1 (58:31):
No, we won't he's certainly not coming back.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
He's long since uh missing in action at this point,
oh yeah, and who can blame him,given what might happen to him
if we caught him right?
But then you have these listsof people, like in eight, eight
thousand and eight that thathe's beholden to, and and Freud
pops up a number of times.
So he talks about CommanderThompson, who you know.
(58:54):
When he was 12 years old helearned the Freudian mysteries
from somebody who'd studied withFreud.
Commander Thompson didn't studywith Freud.
He did send Freud a postcardonce.
There's a postcard in the Freudarchive from Commander Thompson
.
There's a postcard in the Freudarchive from Commander Thompson
.
Russell Miller found the log ofa ship that went through the
(59:15):
Panama Canal in 1923, and RonHubbard and Commander Thompson
were aboard that ship, so it'svery likely he did meet him.
I don't think he learned muchabout the Freudian mysteries.
Having read his diaries when hewas 15 and 16, he just seemed
like a kid really wasn'tthinking deep thoughts, right.
(59:35):
The only trouble with China isthere are too many chinks there.
They could use the Great Wallas a roller coaster.
And his only comment aboutmysticism, having said he'd
studied with gurus in China,india, tibet and Mongolia, the
only comment in his handwrittendiaries is that he visited a
(59:55):
lama suri and the monks soundedlike bullfrogs.
That's it, oh boy.
But with Freud there is thatclue and there are a series of
lectures given before the FirstWorld War in Worcester,
massachusetts, by Freud and inone of them he describes the
dianetic method.
He's got counting back, he'sgot the flickering of the
(01:00:16):
eyelids, he's got charge,emotional charge.
He's got the engram, doesn'tuse the word.
But he says that this you knowwhere, hubbard.
So we see he didn't understandthe unconsciousness of the pain
stuff.
No, he's got that too.
You've pretty much got themethod.
And then Freud explains why youdon't use it.
And that's because it makes theperson more dependent, not less
(01:00:38):
dependent, on the therapist.
Makes sense.
Well, I believe Freud was anutter and total con artist.
It's been one of my studiesover the years.
But frederick crew's book aboutfreud is is exceptional and you
you find him stealing ideasfrom people.
(01:01:00):
He's.
You know when I first I leftscientology my well, hubbard
credits freud.
I'd better read some freud.
And I can remember reading thefirst paragraph of a Freud
lecture and going this is justlike Hubbard, this is a guy
who's narcissistic, he'sboasting and he's paranoid
Everybody's out to get him.
You know, it's sort of oh, thisis the same kind of temperament
(01:01:20):
Interesting.
But, nonetheless, you have thisoriginal thesis, you might call
it, which would be turned intoDianetics.
Yeah, I mean, a similar methodwas used.
There was a hypnotist calledwilliam brown, who's famous
because when agatha christiewent missing and the largest
(01:01:40):
manhunt in british history wasto try and find her, when she
turned up and said I don't knowwhat happened, I have amnesiaia,
she saw this guy, william Brown, and he used methods in the
1930s that are strangely similarto Hubbard's approach in 1950.
But yeah, so this idea, you knowthat was a lot of.
(01:02:02):
You know the research to doBlue Sky had to get into all
sorts of archives.
I had to get into all sorts ofarchives there are.
You know, I'm one of the.
I was one of the people who wasinterviewed for a book called
Religion Inc by a guy calledStuart Lamont and he interviewed
five of us to write a book.
When I checked through Blue Sky, there is material from 150
(01:02:26):
people.
Wow, but most of the materialcomes from Hubbard.
Yeah, as you've seen in readingit.
It's just you don't have tomake anything up.
No, he was two years old, fouryears old or six years old when
he became a blood brother of theBlackfoot people.
(01:02:47):
I was in a deposition withKendrick moxon, toxic moxon, um,
one of the 38 unindictedco-conspirators, along with ron
hubbard in the mary suitcase.
Yes, and I had a couple ofinteresting days with with him
in this deposition and he hepushed this thing across.
He said you say that ronhubbard was not a blood brother
(01:03:08):
of the Blackfoot.
Here is a letter on theletterhead of the Blackfoot
people by a member of the tribalcouncil saying that he was.
And I didn't even look at it.
I said it's tree many feathers,isn't it?
And he wasn't a member of thetribal council.
And he pulled the thing backand looked at it and went.
(01:03:30):
Looked he went, oh no, he's noton the letter tree many
feathers.
If you look to los angelestimes of june 1990, he's
interviewed and he says I'm aneighth blood raccoon.
I found out that there was.
There were no records, so I hada ceremony and made him a blood
brother.
Wow, to two or three pointsthere that the tribal historian
(01:03:55):
said we'd never made a bloodbrother and the deputy chief of
the tribe said you know, there'sno such thing and indeed I
don't believe any NativeAmerican group have ever made a
blood brother.
It's a Viking myth thatHollywood imported in the 1920s
(01:04:17):
and 30s.
But Hubbard quite liked theidea, evidently, and you kind of
go.
So they made you a full-bloodbrave at the age of two.
That is a little fanciful, isn'tit?
That one I did trace down, andthis was the nature of the
research, to try and find outanything and everything.
Every story he told has sometiny little grain of truth in it
(01:04:37):
.
So what was the connection withthe blackfoot people?
His aunt, as I say, margaretroberts said never heard of them
.
Don't know what that's about.
I finally I got a map hereferences.
He gets the date wrong.
I think he calls it the 1910edition of the encyclopedia
britannica.
It's actually 1911 or it's theother way around.
(01:04:58):
One suddenly arrived in abookshop and he scrunched 38
volumes for five pounds, the,the, the one he'd used.
In that britannica there is amap of the reservations of the
Pecun people and you see thatthe train line that took him
(01:05:18):
from his place of birth, tilden,nebraska, at six months old,
through to Helena Montana goesthrough a Blackfoot reservation.
Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
Oh my gosh, and that's the sliver of truth.
Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
Yeah, wow, that there were Blackfoot people begging
on the station.
You know, by this time they'dbeen completely and absolutely
devastated.
Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
And so I imagine that his mum told him something
about how they were on thestation there and he fabricated
this story.
I mean looking at his teenagediaries and how he studied with
gurus in the East and thenseeing what actually happened.
And I think there's a dianeticaxiom where he basically says
(01:06:06):
there is no such thing ascreativity.
You're always working withsomething that's happened and
changing and expanding it, andit's no.
I don't think so.
I think there are people who'vebrought new things into the
world.
Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
But he was describing his own process.
Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Right.
Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Which was that he just stole ideas from people and
expanded them.
And you look at any of thethings he did, like the um
alaskan radio experimentalexpedition, where, um, what
actually happened?
And there's a book, um,published by scientology, of
photographs of ketchikan, alaskayeah, and it shows you that
(01:06:46):
what the expedition was, himspending six months stranded in
Ketchikan, appearing on theradio station there, where he
was much loved, and not actuallydoing any hydrographic charting
or anything of that type,because his catch, the boat, the
magician, had broken down andso he sat there and that becomes
(01:07:07):
that story.
And you look at, you know, Ianalyzed all of the claims that
he made, the Caribbean motionpicture expedition and that one
was freaky because the denialsof the success of that are
articles written by Hubbard atthe time.
So he's saying we didn't achieveanything.
(01:07:27):
Yeah, didn't have any piratebattles at all, which is what
they've been meant to be doing,but we did provide valuable
research for the US HydrographicDepartment.
Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Sure Fascinating.
Well, thank you for all of youramazing extensive research into
all of this and I absolutelyhave been thoroughly enjoying
rereading your book and itcertainly helped me to unravel
things when I first read it 14years ago.
So I did want to comment beforewe wrap up.
(01:08:02):
I found it interesting.
I'd forgotten this, but you're.
I've been asked before if ourpaths crossed which you know I
was seven at asked before if ourpaths crossed, which I was
seven years old, or seven oreight when you got out of
Scientology.
So not much path crossing at StHill.
But I found it interesting thatactually you were at Manchester
(01:08:24):
Org when both of my parentswere there working as staff in
the late 70s.
Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
Interesting.
What's your maiden name?
Ward Ward.
Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Yeah.
And your parents' first namesGraham and Jen G-E-N.
Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Yeah, I remember Jen Ward.
I remember the name, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
Crazy, right, small, small world.
Anyway, one last question foryou before we wrap up, and I
would love to do more with you,because your wealth of knowledge
is just stunning.
What would you tell aScientologist or a current
under-the-radar Scientologist toencourage them to read this
book?
Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
I don't even think it's the right book to read.
I think that it might be toofrightening.
So my approach would be more toparallel and to show the person
something that's notthreatening.
So Scientology is not mentionedin it at all and there are a
(01:09:39):
number of very in fact there area lot of very good ex-member
accounts from groups.
Ex-member accounts from groupsPerhaps Sarah Edmondson's book
about her experience with NXIVM.
Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
Yes.
I'll be interviewing Sarah nextweek.
Interestingly enough that youmentioned that.
Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
Give her my regards.
Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
I will, I absolutely will.
Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
It's a while since we last spoke, but also, you know,
looking at it, it's sort ofunderstanding that this is about
us being human.
It's not about there beinganything special about any
particular group.
Yeah, all of the groups use thesame techniques.
(01:10:33):
Scientology uses nearly all ofthem.
So if you went toTranscendental Meditation and I
did a lot of research on themand there are a couple of videos
on my channel with Pat Ryan andJoe Kelly who are deeply
experienced in TranscendentalMeditation and I take it it's a
negative group.
I do not have a positivefeeling about it at all.
But there and looking at thingslike that videos about things
(01:11:00):
but with TranscendentalMeditation you've got two
techniques.
You know you've got repeatingthe name of a demon or deity
over and over again until yourhead wobbles Not a form of
meditation that I recommend.
I think anything that inducesan altered state in that way is
actually harmful, even though itcan blank out the anxiety
(01:11:25):
you're feeling about otherthings.
I think meditation should be afocusing of attention, not a
blowing away of attention.
Right, um, I recommend the useof music.
Personally, I think you needsomething that's moving rather
than staring at things.
So it's a nice, nice gentlemusic, bit of renaissance
polyphony or a bit of indianclassical music, um, but I I
(01:11:48):
think meditation is a good idea,but you've got that technique
or you've got the, thelevitation technique of tm.
Um, I interviewed a woman whenI was researching a book on tm
which I didn't do in the end whohad fractured her coccyx by
doing that, which is an awfullypainful thing to do and will be
painful for the rest of yourlife.
(01:12:08):
Um, transcendental meditationpaid her somewhere over a
hundred thousand dollars, not totalk about it anymore.
Um, when I first met pat ryanback in 91, he had tunnel vision
from all the meditation he'ddone, you know, and I was very
happy.
I didn't see him for years,very happy the next time I saw
him that that that had nowchanged.
(01:12:30):
But you have to be careful withthese things.
But just two techniques.
Scientology actively has morethan 2 000 techniques, right,
and if you start from thebeginning and work on up, there
might be as many as 10 000.
And one of the implants thatScientology uses is to frighten
(01:12:52):
you about the idea of hypnotism.
Yep, this is not hypnotism.
Well, of course Hubbard doesadmit that it is hypnotism in
science of survival.
He cancels the technique usedfor Dianetics because it's
hypnotic.
You'll see a fluttering of theeyelids.
This is a sign of somebodygoing into the very lightest
(01:13:12):
level of trance, hubbard says in1951.
Then it's brought back in 1977.
Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
With the book one that Hubbard Dianetic Auditors
course.
So yeah, I mean, let me thinkabout it and I'll think about
some other particularrecommendations.
I think video is very goodWatching again with NXIVM
Seduced or the Vow, some of thematerial about Rajneesh.
(01:13:43):
Because if people think thatyou know, if you're going to
their confirmation bias their myside bias, so you're
questioning what they believe in, there's resistance immediately
, whereas if you're sort ofgoing well, these are things
that people do, and I mean mypractice from the very beginning
(01:14:03):
.
I'm not interested inconverting anybody or
deconverting anybody.
I never sat down with theintention of getting somebody to
leave Scientology or leave thebeliefs of Scientology.
I always sit down with theperspective of I want this
person to have more and betterinformation that they can check
(01:14:25):
and verify and more control overtheir own thinking.
Because Because the problem isand it happens in all cultures
and at all times that we thinkwithin the constraints that are
laid upon us and to beindependent in our thinking is
extremely difficult to develop ahealthy skepticism about all
(01:14:47):
things, be willing to, you know,agreeably challenge anything
and everything.
So you know, I find that I haverobust and good conversations
with people of all sorts ofbelief.
I was visiting a friend thisweek who's a theologian and I
(01:15:07):
don't believe what he believesand he doesn't believe what I
believe, except that we bothbelieve that we should be
compassionate, that we should bedecent in our behavior towards
other people and that it's okayfor us to talk about anything.
My friend, christian Sherco, isalso a theologian and we've
(01:15:29):
known each other since 1987.
We've never had a disagreementand I have challenged and
questioned ideas in the NewTestament with him and he's very
happy to talk about it.
Nice, you know which is theplace we ought to get to that.
Robert Thouless, pretty much theinventor of critical thinking
and also a significant member ofthe British Society for
(01:15:52):
Psychical Research in the 1970s.
So there you go.
But Thouless said if somebodygets upset while they're talking
about something, they're notrational.
So that thing of not upsettingpeople and giving them something
that's helpful to help themexpand the way they think, maybe
(01:16:18):
you know, I'm looking at itright now.
So the compilation of work fromRobert J Lifton called Losing
Reality that is an excellentbook and Lifton is one of the
most important thinkers of thegeneration he's still alive,
aged nearly 100.
And his work on thought reformin China, showing that there are
(01:16:43):
these eight paths we'vementioned.
Loaded language, language thatconfines your thinking.
He was interested to see that,as in the late 70s the
countercult world developed,that his ideas were being used
to say well, this is what thesegroups do.
(01:17:04):
So I think, looking at thingslike the cult of confession
within that, in terms of so forsomebody who's leaving, or to
help somebody to leave, givingthem material that shows that
there are such things in theworld once they've left yes,
blue sky.
Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Yes, for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
And barefaced messiah .
Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
Yes, 100%.
Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
And probably Mark's book as well, because it's the
funniest book about Scientology.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
Yes, and to wrap up, as we discussed at the beginning
, I will have four copies of APiece of Blue Sky.
Let's sell these people a pieceof blue sky signed by yourself.
Thank you so much for thatagreement, for for that um
(01:17:54):
agreement and um.
So for anyone who's watchingthis video, uh, we just ask that
you comment, ask any questionsyou'd like for future
discussions and I will be givingthose out to this community,
because there's a lot of amazingpeople interested in this topic
and um who could benefit fromreading the book, I think think
yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:18:09):
And if you want to explain Scientology to somebody
who's never been involved in it,I wrote a little book called
Scientology Cult of Greed.
Yes, and it's just the bulletpoints.
You know, but you've got theact.
You know where, in 1947, whereL Ron Hubbard asks for
psychiatric treatment, theletter is reprinted in the book,
(01:18:30):
so you can see his own wordsabout his suicidal inclinations
and how messed up he was at thevery moment he's claiming to
have developed this technique.
Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
Interesting, yeah, fascinating.
Well, thank you so much.
As always, john, it's been avery interesting, fascinating
conversation for me as well, soI always learn new things when
talking with you.
So thank you so much for yourtime and I hope to speak to you
again soon, yeah that'd be great, thanks so much Awesome.
(01:19:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
Thanks for watching.
If you'd like to help supportthe channel, feel free to check
out the merch store link in thedescription.
If you'd like to help supportthe channel, feel free to check
out the merch store link in thedescription.
We have Hail Xenu Xenu is myhomeboy and BFG branded mouse
pads, shirts, mugs, all sorts ofother stuff in there that helps
us to bring you new content ona regular basis.
You can also pick up a copy ofmy book Blown for Good Behind
(01:19:26):
the Iron Curtain of Scientologyin hardback, kindle and audible
versions as well.
There's also a link to ourpodcast, and you can get that on
Apple, spotify or wherever youlisten to podcasts, and if you'd
like to watch another video,you can click on this link right
here, or you can click on thisone here, or you can click on
(01:19:47):
the subscribe button right here.
Thanks a lot, until next time.
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