Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (27 page)

The processes for each of these were devised based on what the staff in the LRH Technical Research & Compilations area thought would work best. These were then written up for the auditors that were doing the Super Power Pilot program and they wrote up whether or not they “worked” or what happened instead.

I remember seeing one of the Feshbach brothers on the Par Course (fitness trail) one day with his auditor, Gelda Mithoff. The Par Course was an exercise course at the Int Base that had various obstacles and sand pits off to the side of the track where one could work out and check one’s heart rate. He was walking across one of the wood balance beams. Hmmmm? Could he have been perfecting the perception of “balance”? Maybe. He could have been doing a whole series of them. If he fell down at any point during the course they could switch over to the “Pain” perception. Anyway, that is where they apparently did a bulk of the perceptions with the Feshbach brothers.

After a few weeks and they had all “completed” the pilot rundowns, the Feshbachs donated at least 4 million dollars between them and their families to the Super Power Building in Clearwater, Florida.

There was very little written up by LRH on what to do on some of the rundowns. On this one rundown, the Perception Rundown, he said that the perceptions needed to be trained and tested. There was very little direction or writing on how to do this. Hubbard had said to have the person put his attention on the perception and then take his attention off it. This was one of the biggest blocks to Super Power getting done. No one on staff was qualified to figure this out. Some of these things were highly technical and required complicated engineering and design work.

The Super Power building plans had been announced in 1991. Five years later they had not even been designed! How would they design and build and test 57 perceptics systems that could be installed and used at the Int base and then perfected and reinstalled at the new Super Power building? In 1998, discussions occurred about how they could properly pilot the Super Power Rundowns in order to know how to build the building in Florida. Would they have to build all of the perceptics systems at Int BEFORE the building could be properly designed? This was a huge situation that needed to be addressed. Not only did it need to be worked on, but it had to be worked on by people that were not already working on some other aspect of Super Power as then that would come to a screeching halt.

Dave Miscavige came up with the solution. Who within the Scientology organization structure had designed and built things that were not already figured out by others? CST. The Church of Spiritual Technology was the organization responsible for designing and building the secret underground bunkers in California and New Mexico. They were the ones that had figured out how to put all Hubbard’s writings onto titanium plates and gold records. They had also been able to do all this with an unlimited amount of funds provided by Author Services, Inc. These funds were primarily from royalties of fiction and non-fiction book sales, limited edition artwork, as well as public donations for “Preservation of the Tech”. Russ Bellin, the Commanding Officer of CST, was the driving force in getting these things done.

Russ and his crew were brought in and briefed on what was needed. They had to work fast because the new Super Power building needed to be designed around what they were going to ultimately come up with in terms of designs for the individual perceptic systems.

When CST was done testing and devising the perceptics devices, pilots could actually be done correctly for the first time. But when would this start?

Since LRH originally wrote about Super Power in 1978, it had never made its way into being delivered in a Scientology Organization. LRH’s original intention for Super Power was that it was for the out ethics unproductive staff that were running Scientology Internationally. It was not originally intended for public at all!

2003 – Cine Castle

The Cine Sec Gold, Lisa Schroer, came to see me in the Cine Castle. Russ Bellin and several CST staff needed to set up a perceptic device for testing at the Cine Castle. By this time, I was the Pre-Production Director over the Cine Castle and thus over anything that needed to be set up in it, since I had the Sets and Props Crew under me as well as the manpower to build and move stuff.

Russ Bellin was going to meet with us along with some of his CST staff. We met in the main Studio. Tom Willis and Tom Vorm, both very tall CST staff came and saw us with Russ Bellin. Russ did all of the talking. He filled us in on what was going to happen. For one of the upcoming
Freewinds
events for the upper level Scientologists (OT VIIIs), we needed to show some of the new perceptics devices in order to get more donations for the Super Power project. Dave Miscavige had directed Russ Bellin to set up and shoot video footage of a few of these devices.

The ones we would be setting up would be the “Orbitron” and the “Zero Gravity Rig”. The Orbitron was your basic personal Gyro Spin rig that you can get on at the high-end gyms with one small additional detail. It was motorized and had a joystick installed on it so that you could adjust your spin and axis in any direction while riding it. If there was a perceptic that had to do with perception of puke leaving your mouth, this was the rig to test that. I am cool with roller coasters, but this thing was like the craziest roller coaster you have ever ridden – on crack. It had metal diamond plate panels on every flat surface imaginable.

The next perceptic rig was pretty tame compared to the Barfitron. It consisted of two 18-foot high sets of wire trusses that supported a personal harness over a span of about 20 feet. With a set of weights matched to the person’s own body weight, you could walk with the apparency of zero gravity. If you gave a small push against the ground with your foot while in the harness, you would raise several feet into the air. This rig, while cool, was insanely loud. A water vacuum was being used to regulate the weight balance, and motors and pumps were grinding away while the person bounced around in the rig. It also had quite a few moving wires and parts that were sensitive to movement.

When the CST crew showed up with the two rigs for us to shoot, they brought along the guy that helped them build these things. The guy was very cool and had a tricked out truck with metal diamond plates on every surface possible. I was starting to see where the design criteria were coming from for these perceptic rigs. After setting up the rigs and talking with him a bit, it was clear he was just an engineer that worked out of his own shop and was the local guy that CST had found to work on their stuff. I gathered he was from Running Springs or another nearby town to them.

While these rigs seemed fine for a small shoot to pump some people up and get them to dump more money down for the Super Power building, I myself could not fathom how they would be perfecting these to install in a building for regular and constant use by paying public. Just think about how often roller coasters break down and people get hurt. Now just pretend that Billy Bob down the street designed and built the roller coaster. That was what these rigs were. They were home grown projects that had a lot of money behind them.

After we had set up the rigs and shot the footage, Dave Miscavige thought he would show off all the work his CST people had done and started bringing more and more perceptics rigs to the base for people to see and try out. He actually had many of these set up in his newly built 70 million-dollar RTC “Building 50”. Funnily enough, the 70 million dollar RTC building went from design to built in no more than five years. That included the interior work being redone several times and having a lot of very expensive furniture custom built, but still it got done in one fourth of the time as the Super Power building! Once the perceptics were set up, Dave showed us these himself and compared them to what was done before over the past twenty years.

There was the Smell perceptic. Hundreds and hundreds of vials of distinct smells that did not evaporate. You name it, bananas, peppermint, sunflowers, any smell that you can think of, they had it in a vial. There were rows and rows of vials and each one had a number on it. Some of the smells were very similar, like oranges, tangerines, orange peel, orange juice, you had to tell the difference and until you could name each and every one correctly, you did not finish this perceptic.

Dave Miscavige said that before CST had made and designed the perceptic devices, the smell perceptic was done using plates of oranges, apples, lemons and bananas. You could have done the old smell perceptic with a hotel breakfast cart! So that is how the Feshbachs got through the smell perceptic.

We saw a rig for drilling the balance perceptic. It was a small diamond plate platform about 3 feet wide that had a small handle bar that came up from the floor and had three places where you could grab with your hand. You would stand on the platform and it would slightly adjust its pitch randomly to try and get you to fall off. If you grabbed the handles it would shut off and default the platform back to its flat position. Ray Mithoff got on the machine and Russ Bellin turned it on. Before it could even really start to change its pitch, Ray lost his balance and grabbed the handles. Even I lasted around 15 seconds before grabbing the handle on my first go!

While we thought this “show and tell” was very interesting, Dave Miscavige had another reason for showing us all this stuff.

One morning shortly thereafter, he called us all into the main conference room in Building 50. We all knew that this would be one of those six-hour meetings where he would tell us why we were all responsible for keeping this project stalled. He explained that CST had spent many years and many millions of dollars perfecting the perceptic devices for the new Super Power building. Even with that he did not think that would get us any closer to opening the new building. Why?

START OF MEETING: The Super Power building had been redesigned and partially built, but was having to be redesigned again to properly fit the new perceptics rigs and even that was a guess as none of the rundowns had been delivered with these devices, they had just been worked out on paper. They had not been tested or piloted with people and auditing. Dave reminded us that the new designs also meant that all the money that the Landlord office spent on the original “Death Star” Super Power Building design had to be scrapped and the new design would match the Fort Harrison more. That was millions of dollars wasted on the old plans, designs, models, etc.

Now here was the real clincher. There was nobody to do any of the work that was needed to get Super Power ready.

Who was going to do these pilots? The base staff were out-ethics criminals and could not get case gain. That had been the problem all along; you cannot get standard results on people that are out ethics. But it was a confidential program that needed to be done at the base. (Funny, that was the EXACT reason LRH developed Super Power in the first place—to make the out-ethics staff at Int into productive staff.)

So after the pilot Super Power Rundowns are done on a mysterious group of people, who was going to write up the processes and codify how they get delivered? Someone had to write up the course pack that each person receiving the rundowns studies. Someone had to write a Super Power Course Supervisor Course Pack. And a Super Power Case Supervisor Course Pack has to be written up and checksheets had to be written up for all of these packs.

The packs had to be designed, printed, and then they had to be tested in conjunction with the actual devices and how the building was laid out.

How could you have multiple people doing the rundown at the same time? Were people going to be stuck on one perceptic system more than others? Did there need to be multiple rooms for some perceptics and fewer of others? These were all questions that had been unanswered for years and would remain unanswered for many more years.

The whole reason that Flag was being streamlined in the mid-90s was to increase the number of new Ls Auditors. Ls were the single largest source of income of all Scientology services. That was part of the reason the Golden Age of Tech came about. It was an effort to make a machine for creating Ls auditors faster than had ever been done before. More Ls Auditors would equal more money. If it could work for Ls auditors, all tech should be trained that way.

And then, of course there was the Cause Resurgence Rundown, or Running Program. This had been an extensive pilot programs for as long as Super Power and still it was not totally worked out.

Hundreds of people at the base have done the Running Program. It was a very simple program. I know, because I myself did it. A person would run around a dirt track until they were physically exhausted and could run no longer. They would be allowed to come inside a small area with couches in it and rest. As soon as they were rested, they were instructed to go outside and run again. When I say run, I do not mean walk fast, I mean run like you are being chased. You would do this non-stop for at least five hours per day. That was the absolute minimum hours the program could be done daily. Most people doing the program were asked to go for a full ten or twelve hours daily. The length of the rundown was different for every person. I myself took about three months to complete the program. The last day I was on the program, I ran for six hours without stopping. I did the pilot version of the rundown. All of the materials I read while doing the pilot rundown were written in the early 1980’s.

The Running Program had been done at the base for years. It could only be done by people who are physically fit or who can work up to it, but even the most physically fit had injuries on this program. How were we supposed to deliver this to the public? Also there was the fact that a large percentage of the people who did the program eventually blew or were declared SP. Why was that? What was being done wrong?

And PC, Supervisor, C/S packs and checksheets would also have to be drawn up for the Running Program and people would have to be trained and gotten through it BEFORE the building was opened so that they could be in place beforehand.