Wikipedia: Xenu

As I said previously, Wikipedia offers an incredible variety of online articles. And while I don't want to trash anyone's religion, an article I found on Wikipedia convinced me that Scientology is...overwhelmingly different from my view of the world. I'll just leave it at that.

Consider the Wikipedia entry on Xenu. It's among the most entertaining things I've ever read online. For starters...

In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to cause people problems today. These events are known to Scientologists as "Incident II", and the traumatic memories associated with them as The Wall of Fire or the R6 implant. The story of Xenu is part of a much wider range of Scientology beliefs in extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in Earthly events, collectively described as space opera by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

Got it? Xenu stacked the people around volcanoes (instead of merely dumping them into giant piles), then detonated hydrogen bombs to vaporize their bodies. And now their souls cling to us and cause problems? Seems easy enough.

But wait - there's more. (Italics are from the Wikipedia article.)

75 million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as Teegeeack. The planets were overpopulated, each having on average 178 billion people. The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was comparable to our own, with people "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades", he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers", a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyse them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections". The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans.

When the space planes had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralysed people were unloaded and stacked around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the volcanoes, and all were detonated simultaneously. Only a few people's physical bodies survived.

The now-disembodied victims' souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days. This implanted what Hubbard termed "various misleading data" (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The interior decoration of "all modern theaters" is also said by Hubbard to be due to an unconscious recollection of Xenu's implants. The two "implant stations" cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.

Right. Space planes, hydrogen bombs, disembodied souls, electronic ribbons, and 3-D super colossal motion picture cinemas. The Wikipedia article also discusses the origins of the story (including, not surprisingly, Hubbard's diet of stimulants and depressants) and the influence of Xenu on Scientology. My favorite section, "Critiques of the Xenu Story," includes some wonderful comments:

Critics of Scientology have pointed out that there are many factual and scientific problems with the story of Xenu. There is no scientific evidence that the events Hubbard described ever took place, though in fairness Hubbard never did try to put a scientific gloss on the story.

• Hubbard did not elaborate on the number of space planes required to transport a population of some 13.5 trillion people. The Douglas DC-8, said to be an exact copy of Xenu's spaceships, seats a maximum of 250 people and has a payload of only around 40–50,000 kg, depending on the specific model. This means that, assuming the Galactic citizens had bodies about the same mass as humans, only about 600 to 700 human-sized frozen bodies could have been transported with each trip. It would therefore have required around 54.1 billion trips with everyone seated or 19.3 billion trips with frozen bodies packed more efficiently.
  
  
• Assuming the people were about the same size as humans, 76×178 billion×2 ft³ per alien is 184 cubic miles (766 km³). This is about ten percent of the volume of the Chicxulub Crater, the site of the asteroid impact that is credited with killing the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 mya (million years ago). The frozen bodies would have had to have been stacked a mile (1.6 km) deep, covering an area more than six miles (10 km) across around 6 volcanos. Even assuming that they were all killed, their fossilised remains would certainly be visible in geological strata today. There is no sign of any such remains.
  
  
• The energy required to blow up Xenu's victims would also have been colossal. Thousands of hydrogen bombs with a cumulative explosive force equivalent to gigatonnes of TNT would have been needed. This would certainly have left physical traces; Forde lists plausible craters as the Manson crater (35 km, dated at 73.8 MYA), Eagle Butte (10 km) and Dumas (2 km, both 78–74 MYA).
  
  
• Such a huge release of energy, more than during a full-scale nuclear war, would have wrecked the Earth's climate, causing a nuclear winter and prompting a mass extinction of terrestrial life. The hydrogen bombs would have left a residue of radioactive isotopes which would have been easily detectable today. It has been suggested that Hubbard meant to explain the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event through the Xenu story, but got the dates wrong — 75 MYA as opposed to 65 MYA — though this is unproven. There is no evidence of mass extinctions around the earlier time.
  
  
• The volcanoes that Hubbard mentions in the story (notably Las Palmas and Hawaii) did not exist at the time that the events of Incident II are said to have taken place.
  
  
• Finally, the earlier Incident I is set four quadrillion years ago, which is nearly 300,000 times the currently accepted age of the Universe of 13.7 billion years.

There's more, but I'll leave you with that. When you need a mental break from whatever you're doing (studying, anyone?), you can rely on Wikipedia for a distraction.