IT'S ACTUALLY NOT SO EASY TO DISMISS 'INTERGALACTIC SATAN' XENU

LONG before Trump, Putin or Morrissey, there was Xenu. According to the story – which you’ll be charged around £100,000 to hear from a Scientologist – he was an intergalactic warlord who killed billions of fellow aliens with atom bombs in Hawaii 75 million years ago. See, what you paid for this week’s Sunday Herald was even more of a bargain than usual. Especially if you're online.

Now, before you click on Iain Macwhirter’s face for sanctuary and sanity, let it be known that this was a good week for Scientologists. A new scientific paper has speculated that it is actually not beyond the realms of possibility that a seismic nuclear event took place during the planet’s distant past. Highly unlikely, but not impossible.

According to this in-depth academic study on atmospheric changes in Earth’s history, which will warm Tom Cruise's cockles, we would find it very difficult indeed to disprove any such ancient Xenu apocalypse. This compelling paper even speculates that an entire ancient industrial revolution could have taken place millions of years ago.

Scientists, like humans, have only been around for the past 100,000 years of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-annum existence. Geological time is a tapestry so incomprehensibly vast that our present fossil records are but flint sparks attempting to light up a room the size of China. The fact is, any evidence of previous intelligent civilisations stretching further back than the Quaternary period – 2.6 million years ago – has long since been turned over by worms, terraformed by geological forces or crushed to dust.

There are fossils, of course – unless you believe a supernatural creator plonked them around the planet to test your faith. Surely it would have been less hassle just to set evolution in motion.

With such unimaginable expanses of time at play, many scientists believe it would be quite easy, therefore, to miss an advanced civilisation’s reign on the planet even if it had lasted 100,000 years – 500 times longer than our own industrial revolution thus far. Homo sapiens’ current achievements are but a grain of rice flicked into space – inconsequential in the great expansion of infinity. Except for all that plastic, of course – depressingly likely to be all that’s left behind as our species’ legacy. That, and an American flag on the moon that was likely made in Taiwan.

Similar musings on the Earth’s past, present and future were highlighted in the new International Journal of Astrobiology research paper written by Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochestera and Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In the study, the pair hypothesise about how significant environmental changes can be measured by carbon in the atmosphere – something scientists call the Suess effect. This has been easy to detect within the last century of our polluting species’ kinky self-asphyxiation of course, but what is truly fascinating is that such techniques have registered evidence of several as-yet-unexplained “events” over the Earth’s history. These include a mysterious occurrence around 50 million years ago which scientists dub, like a Yes album, The Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin. This was when huge atmospheric disturbances during the Cretaceous period – when Scotland was submerged under a tropical sea and T-Rex roamed the Earth – left the planet’s ocean without oxygen for many thousands of years.

As fun as it is to hypothesise about the cause of such anomalies – whether it be ancient civilisations destroying themselves or a prankster god – Frank and Schmidt note this event and others like it were “almost certainly not” caused by any such frivolity. They don’t mention Xenu’s nuclear apocalypse though. Clearly not ruling it out, then.

The new paper also speculates not only on the rise of multiple self-aware intelligences on Earth, but also the infinite possibilities of civilisation cycles all over the universe. It hypothesises that all intelligent life in the cosmos relies upon the corpses of their ancestors to survive, with the decomposition of long-dead organisms and plants supplying the fossil fuels to get off the planet in the first place.

Professor Frank proposes that the eventual – and perhaps inevitable – collapse of all cosmic civilisations triggers the mass grave extinction events needed for oil, gas and other natural reserves to be built up. Future intelligent lifeforms then deplete these graveyards to fuel their own industrial periods, before society again collapses and the cycle starts again millennia in the future.

Perhaps the highly-evolved dolphin-folk of 70,000,000AD on Earth may be the ones who eventually reach Mars – fuelled by Elon Musk’s decomposed body.

THE THEOLOGY BEHIND AN ALIEN MINDSET

IT should be stressed that unexplained atmospheric anomalies throughout Earth’s history are likely to have been naturally occurring events – nowt to do with aliens, ancient industrial revolutions or paranoid, vengeful gods. Unless you worship volcanos or meteorites.

Still, for those not familiar with the frown-inducing surrealism of John Travolta’s belief system – and Beck, sigh – a brief overview of Scientology theology goes like thus: Xenu was an alien warlord who ruled over 76 planets in an ancient galactic federation. Rather similar to Star Trek, which was – entirely coincidentally, I’m sure – a pop culture smash when L Ron was channelling his religion’s origin tale from the ether.

So Xenu ruled unchallenged, but he had one problem – over-population. Each of his planets, including Earth – then called Teegeeack – had around 178 billion people and competition for resources was causing war, pestilence and plague across the galaxy.

The bold L Ron was always very precise with figures – obviously privy to some ancient intergalactic census. He once claimed to have travelled trillions of years into the past to view a previous life, despite the universe only being 14.6 billion years old. But that’s nothing – strap yourselves in tight if you haven’t already.

With the help of alien psychiatrists (boo) and the intergalactic media (hiss) Xenu persuaded billions of aliens to visit him for – no other way to put this other than how L Ron himself described it – income tax audits.

But these prudent, law-abiding beings had been tricked – and were all captured then frozen by Xenu. Seriously, don’t ask. These billions of bodies were then flown in spaceships to a group of islands now called Hawaii on a planet now known as Earth.

These extraterrestrial ice cubes were then dropped off at the islands’ volcanos and wiped out with atom bombs in a truly grotesque act of genocide. It’s doubtful even Putin would have supported the Xenu regime.

There was a problem, however – billions of dead alien souls had been released from their bodies, and were now being blown around the planet by nuclear gusts. Xenu, however, managed to catch them all with special electronic beams – I’m picturing Ghostbusters’ proton packs, which L Ron likely saw before his death in 1986.

The warlord’s special force fields then compressed these poor captured souls into “clusters” and took them to huge cinemas, even bigger than the Science Centre IMAX. Here, they were hypnotically brainwashed or, to use the Scientology term, “implanted”. According to L Ron, they were forced to spend 36 days – again, an admirably exact timeframe – watching “3D motion pictures” of torture, dissection, crucifixion, sexual perversion, auto accidents and other horrors. Seems Channel 5 launched earlier then 1997 after all.

After this Clockwork Orange-style “implanting” process – again, another movie Hubbard would have been familiar with – the soul clusters remained stuck together in groups of a few thousand, scrubbed of their sense of individual identity.

These confused alien spirits then decided to inhabit bodies on Earth like parasitic demons, eventually polluting homo sapiens when we evolved. Even someone as pure as Phillip Schofield has thetans inside him, according to L Ron. As for Xenu, he was finally overthrown and imprisoned in an unknown mountaintop somewhere on Earth. He is kept there by a force field powered by an eternal battery, and is apparently still alive today. That makes him even older than Kirk Douglas. Maybe he is Kirk Douglas.

If you made it to this paragraph, then you’ve likely accepted you are infected with these pesky body thetans. The NHS can do nothing for this affliction, however. There is no antibiotic or for-profit pharmaceutical pill. If you are to become spiritually free, then you must exorcise these aliens with lots of expensive “auditing”. The NHS won’t cover that either. Not even Bupa.

This is an eye-waveringly expensive process – and that story you’ve just read is only shared when you reach a sexy-sounding upper level of spiritual development called Operating Thetan 3. There are eight levels. After that, you gain the ability to telepathically communicate with your alien pollutants and convince them to b****r off elsewhere. The disclaimer is, however, that to gain these superpowers you must truly believe in the Xenu origin tale. John Travolta does – but probably also thinks he’ll have another hit movie too.

THE SCIENCE OF SCIENTOLOGY

JUST like the firefighter has a hose and the lollipop person a lollipop, any serious Scientologist has an E-meter. Or an electroencephaloneuromentimograph, to those in the trade. Memorise that word and you’ll have no problem convincing Tom Cruise that you have eradicated the alien soul clusters from your body. You might even get to marry him. Fourth time lucky and all that.

The legendary E-meter is actually a relatively simple device, an electrical conduit with two “cans” to grip that measure your, ahem, “resistance” in the unit of ohms. Scientology’s Jesus – the highly imaginative and charismatic science fiction author L Ron Hubbard – claimed E-meters measure a person’s “galvanic skin response” when asked questions. Nice try, L Ron, that almost sounded like real science. So, it’s a Del Boy-style “lie detector” then. It’s likely even Jeremy Kyle’s machines are more sophisticated.

Hubbard was a fan of using E-meters to aid the “auditing” of Scientologists – essentially, an amateur therapy session where a series of psychologically destabilising questions are hurled at the participant. Such dangerous exposition of the subconscious apparently has the noble aims of removing “spiritual disabilities” and making the Scientologist aware of their “immortality, basic goodness and personal divine nature”. Sounds kosher to me. Oh, it also reveals their past lives as aliens. And the state of their “static fields”. Still, a good auditing also apparently cures what ails ya, and by exorcising the wee alien ghosts in our bodies we are relieved of ill health and bad impulses.

How does the E-meter assist? Here we go down the rabbit hole. In the early 1950s, Hubbard claims he made a seismic discovery that something odd is “entangling man” – describing our “combinations of mental image pictures” as a debilitating force. A bit like that webcam image of EastEnders’ Dirty Den with his finger in his mouth, inset. No-one can ever unsee that either. Must have been all the alien ghosts attaching themselves to Leslie Grantham’s body that made him buy that laptop.

Hubbard, however, claimed to have “measured” these mind pictures using an E-metre co-designed by his pal Volney Mathison – who was also apparently a chiropractor, radio engineer, psychologist, and hypnotist. Although they forgot to add chancer, he still seemed quite the renaissance man.

The E-meter has gone through several generations since those early days, and the current model is known as the Super Mark VII. It looks a bit like a Nintendo console. An electrical engineer who examined one in the 1990s estimated that such a device should only be on sale for around £200. Today, it is sold by the Church of Scientology for around £2,800. Global opulence funded by the contributions of true believers? Definitely sounds like a religion to me.

Although some believers might suggest that it’s easier for a camel to get though the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven, it should be noted you sign your soul over to Scientology for one billion years. That’s a long retirement period, so better start making some serious money now. And you’re going to get lonely living that long – especially with Scientology’s fondness for “disconnection” – a severing of ties between believers and their sceptical friends, colleagues and family members.

Then again, such harshness does have precedent in religion. A man called Jesus, according to Luke 14:26, once said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” And they didn’t even have E-metres, celebrities or bank accounts in those days.