The year was 1950. The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, written by a 39-year-old "pulp" writer of science fiction, L. Ron Hubbard. A few months earlier, Hubbard had outlined the book's tenets in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. And a year before that, at a lecture for science fiction writers, Hubbard had mused, "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be ...

MELBOURNE. - A Supreme Court judge in Melbourne ruled yesterday that the Church of the New Faith, practising scientology, was not a religious institution. The church had asked Mr Justice Crockett to rule that it was a religious institution and not liable to pay State payroll tax. The church had appealed against the refusal of the Commissioner of Payroll Tax to exempt it from paying payroll tax. Mr Justice Crockett said an institution did not become religious in character simply because ...

The Scientology organisation's claims to be a religion were a sham, a Supreme Court judge said yesterday. Some of its services were grotesque, a mockery of religion, he said. Mr Justice Crockett made the comments in dismissing an appeal by the organisation, calling itself the Church of the New Faith, against a decision of the Commissioner of Payroll Tax not to grant it exemption from the tax as a religious institution. The Guardian of the Melbourne Church of Scientology, the Reverend ...

On September 5, 1980, as U.S. District Court Judge Charles Richey was recuperating from two pulmonary embolisms and exhaustion, lawyers for the Church of Scientology and the Justice Department gathered before Judge Aubrey Robinson, Richey's successor in the two-year-old conspiracy case against 11 members of the Church of Scientology. Judge Richey had already convicted and sentenced nine of the original 11 defendants, but the remaining two, recently extradited from England, were about to go on trial. "Particularly from the standpoint of ...

An education group organizing in the Cupertino School District area may have tried to play down its affiliation with a controversial religious cult, the Church of Scientology. The non-profit Applied Scholastics Inc. (ASI) has also held unauthorized training courses for three district teachers at the district's Hoover School after a request to have the district sponsor ASI programs was turned down by Associate Superintendent for Instruction William Zachmeier. "We're not a front for Scientology," stressed ASI Executive Director Lisa Patella. "Our ...

The faithful inner core serve as thieves, decoys and spies. The shocking story behind one of the most dangerous “religious cults” operating today IN THE late 1940s, pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard declared, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million, the best way would be to start his own religion.” Hubbard did start his own religion, calling it the “Church of Scientology,” and it has grown into an enterprise today grossing ...

The Church of Scientology first moved into Riverside County when it opened a mission in Riverside in 1972. Later, it was revealed that the Church had a secret operation at La Quinta, near Indio. Now, from court records, it has been learned the church has established its worldwide command center at Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet. Here is the second of a two parts on the Gilman operation. ''[I do not have the first part of this special Gilman coverage. Of ...

LANSING — The Michigan Department of Corrections paid more than $100,000 during the last three years to a drug treatment program with veiled ties to the controversial Church of Scientology. Leaders of the drug program, known as Narconon, admit it is based on Scientology teachings, but they deny any affiliation with the church. A state corrections official said he was satisfied that Scientology does not run Narconon. Church records obtained by The Detroit News showed, however, that Scientology leaders created Narconon ...

Confidential documents from various Ontario Government offices including an attorney-general's communication about police intelligence operations have been found in U.S. Church of Scientology files. The documents were part of the evidence submitted by federal attorneys in the Washington prosecution of U.S. leaders of the cult on charges of conspiring to steal government documents and obstruct justice by cover-ups and by kidnapping an informer. Of 12 indicted, including two in Britain and the informer, nine have been tried, convicted and sentenced by ...

The Church of Scientology of Michigan opened its new state headquarters Monday in the former Burton Abstract & Title building in downtown Detroit. The church group, which claims 4,000 adherents in Michigan, bought the 50-year-old, four-story stone structure from Burton in October for $650,000 cash. The church headquarters had been at 3605 Rochester Road in Royal Oak. Citing a desire "to be more centrally located for our parishioners," Suzanne Lee, Scientology's local public relations director, said the church spent the last ...

BOSTON — A 29-year-old former member of the Church of Scientology filed a $200-million lawsuit Thursday against the church, charging that the group has cheated thousands of converts by subjecting them to "mind control." Lavenda Van Schaick of Somerville, Mass. contended in the suit filed in U.S. District Court here that the church misled her into divorcing her husband, paying about $13,000 for Scientologist instruction and working for the church without pay for nine years in Clearwater and Las Vegas, Nev. ...

WASHINGTON — Nine leaders of the Church of Scientology, in a rare legal maneuver, have agreed to be found guilty by a federal judge on reduced charges of conspiracy and theft as an outgrowth of their long battle with the federal government over allegedly stolen U.S. documents. Under a procedure called a "stipulated record," the defendants agreed to be found guilty after the government presented its case in a written court record without challenge or a trial, which could have lasted ...

How a Portland jury got a crash course in one of the oddest "religions" ever created and awarded the plaintiff more than $2. million Note: This summer, a jury in Portland spent a month listening to testimony in a $4 million lawsuit over the practices of the Church of Scientology there. The plaintiff: Julie Christofferson, a young Portland woman who was a follower of Scientology in 1975 and 1976. The defendants: three local Scientology organizations and one of their leaders. ''Richard ...

Bonn WEST GERMANY — BONN (AP) - A legal battle is raging between the Scientology Church and the West German army over a draft deferment for a trainee minister of the controversial cult. The deferment was granted to 23-year-old Franz Walter Siedler by a Darmstadt court last December, freeing him from 15 months of military duty while he completes studies in the Scientology Church of Germany, which claims 20,000 members. The deferment was the first ever granted in West Germany to ...

Forgive the digression, but as a child, I had a fool-proof method for falling asleep. If I were lying wide-awake in bed, I would categorize my thoughts, imagining my mind was a room full of filing cabinets. Into each of these files (not unlike the ones where the Mouseketeers kept their cartoons) went one worry or problem. By the time the data was transferred, I would be asleep. The point being that I viewed my mind as something akin to a ...

"The DEFENSE of anything is untenable. The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversations, public debate, or a court of law." — L. Ron Hubbard For more than a decade, the worldwide Church of Scientology, one of the burgeoning new religions of the 1960s and '70s, has conducted sophisticated intelligence and propaganda operations on an international ...

On May 14, 1951, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard wrote to the U.S. attorney general to plead for help in fending off a Communist conspiracy, dedicated, he averred, to destroying him. "When, when, when," he wrote, "will we have a roundup?" Rambling through seven single-spaced typewritten pages, the letter was, to all appearances, the heartfelt cry of a troubled man. A successful science fiction writer in the 1940s, L. Ron Hubbard, as he signed himself, had gone on to bigger things. ...

LOS ANGELES, July 6 (AP) — The Government won a major victory in its battle with the Church of Scientology when a judge ruled yesterday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's seizure of thousands of church documents was legal. Federal District Judge Malcom M. Lucas rejected allegations by church attorneys that the F.B.I. had exceeded the scope of a search warrant in the seizures last July 8. Federal attorneys said that the ruling, unless appealed, cleared the way for the documents ...