Book review by Ron Newman

2 Feb 1995

Here is some more information on Eugene Ingram, from the brand-new, hot-off-the-press book _Countercultures: A Sociological Analysis_ (St. Martin's Press, 1995). The author is William W. Zellner, a professor of sociology at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.

One of the six chapters, 32 pages long, is on Scientology. (The other chapters are about skinheads, survivalists, Satanism, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Unification Church of Rev. Moon.)

Anyone collecting books about Scientology should get this one too.

page 126:

...not enough pages are available in this chapter to recount all the excesses of the Church of Scientology's detectives. Nevertheless, church efforts to discredit civic leaders in Newkirk, Oklahoma, to pave the way for Narconon must be retold...

After Bob Lobsinger [publisher of the weekly _Newkirk Herald Journal_] exposed Narconon in his paper as a Scientology front, Scientologists spread the rumor that anyone who opposed the drug treatment center at Chilocco must be an advocate of drugs. The same accusation was leveled at Newkirk pastors who spoke from the pulpit against Scientology. This kind of attack might work in a big city where people don't know their neighbors, but it did not work in Newkirk where everybody knows everyone else and everything about them.... The effort only served to further alienate the community from the Scientologists.
...
Lobsinger also said that the church's attorneys had sent an open letter to many of Newkirk's citizens advising them that "a few local individuals have sought to create intolerance by broadsiding the Churches of Scientology in stridently uncomplimentary terms." The letter further informed readers that Eugene Ingram, a private detective, had been hired to investigate the matter.

Ingram's first contact in Newkirk was with Mayor Garry Bilger's 12-year-old son, whom he found browsing in the local public library. He handed the youngster a business card and told him to have his father call him. Lobsinger called it a bit of "subtle intimidation. It really unnerved his mother."

Also according to Lobsinger, "Investigators...camped out at the local courthouse, where they searched public records for `dirt' on prominent local citizens. They were checking on the banker, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the mayor and his family, and me."