THE DECLINE AND (PROBABLE) FALL OF THE SCIENTOLOGY EMPIRE!
THE DECLINE AND (PROBABLE) FALL OF THE SCIENTOLOGY EMPIRE! by Jim Lippard Jim Lippard reviews two books: Janet Reitman’s book Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, ISBN 978-0618883028) and Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0691146089). This article was published in Skeptic magazine 17.1 in 2011. THERE WAS ONCE A MAN who considered himself an explorer, a military hero, a mystic, a philosopher, a nuclear physicist, and an expert in human nature. In fact, he was none of these things. He was an adventurer, a writer of pulp fiction, and a teller of tall tales. He was a college dropout, a bigamist, convicted of petty theft and fraud, and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to infiltrate and steal information from U.S. government agencies. Despite his unimpressive physique, he was a larger-than- life, charismatic figure who pe