Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

Incident Two is central to the OT III saga. This one took place seventy-five million years ago in the Galactic Confederacy, which was composed of seventy-six planets and twenty-six stars. “The world we live in now replicates the civilization of that period,” Hubbard said. “People at that particular time and place were walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute.… The cars they drove looked exactly the same, and the trains they ran looked the same, and the boats they had looked the same. Circa nineteen-fifty, nineteen-sixty.” A tyrannical overlord named Xenu ruled the Confederacy. “He was a Suppressive to end all Suppressives,” Hubbard told his followers. Xenu had been chosen by a kind of Praetorian guard called the Loyal Officers, but they realized that their leader was wicked and they decided to remove him. Xenu had other plans, Hubbard said. “He took the last moments he had in office to really goof the floof.” Xenu and a few evil conspirators—mainly psychiatrists—fed false information to the population to draw them into centers where Xenu’s troops could destroy them. “One of the mechanisms they used was to tell them to come in for an income-tax investigation,” Hubbard related. “So in they went, and the troops started slaughtering them.” The preferred method was to shoot a needle into a lung, paralyzing the thetan with an injection of frozen alcohol and glycol. The frozen bodies were packed into boxes and loaded onto ...