The Church of Scientology was founded in 1953 by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard as an extension of his self-help book Dianetics. That book claimed that all of a person’s psychological problems can be traced back to unconscious traumatic memories. Scientology teaches that those traumas were actually experienced by (or implanted into) the thousands of alien spirits that have possessed each person’s body. The eventual goal of a Scientologist is to purge those alien spirits in order to achieve what is known as the “State of Clear.”

The centerpiece of the vast “Space Opera” mythology that the Scientology belief system is based on is the story of Xenu, which Hubbard authored in 1967 under the title “OT III“. The story was kept secret from the public and from low-level Church members until it was entered as evidence in a 1985 court case and subsequently revealed by the Los Angeles Times.

About 75 million years ago, Xenu was the alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, which consisted of 76 planets, including Earth (known then as “Teegeeack”). Each planet was home to an average of 178 billion people. In order to deal with this critical overpopulation, Xenu recruited psychologists to bring billions of people in for what they were told would be income tax inspections. Those people were then injected with a paralyzing solution and loaded on space planes which looked very much like the 1960s-era Douglas DC-8, then flown to planet Earth, and then stacked around the bases of volcanoes such as Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many others. Xenu lowered hydrogen bombs into the volcanoes and detonated them, killing everyone.

However, the billions of disembodied alien souls (known as “Thetans” in Scientology-speak) began to float around on the nuclear winds, and Xenu worried that they would try to come back for revenge. So he captured all of the souls using special “sticky” electronic beams, loaded them into boxes, took them to huge cinemas, and made them watch 3-D propaganda films designed to confuse them by implanting all sorts of preposterous ideas about God, the Devil, and Christ, among others. When the films were over, these confused souls thought they were all the same person and therefore clustered together by the thousands. And each cluster of thousands eventually inhabited one of the few remaining living bodies on earth.

Scientology teaches that you and I, until we have achieved the State of Clear, are to this day still being controlled by the traumas and propaganda that were fed to these body thetans by Xenu (including our belief in God), and will continue to be controlled until we have taken the many levels of expensive “auditing” courses offered by the Church that are designed to set us free. The final level of training, OT VIII, also known as “The Truth Revealed”, can only take place on Scientology’s luxury cruise ship, the Freewinds. It costs $10,000.

The Latter Day Saint movement was founded in 1827 by New Yorker Joseph Smith, Jr. In the early 1820s, Smith was paid to (mostly unsuccessfully) attempt to find lost items and buried treasures by peering into stones and finding the necessary information contained in the stone’s reflections.

Smith said that an angel visited him in 1823 and told him of a set of inscribed golden plates buried in a hill near his home in Western New York, which he unearthed in 1827. Smith transcribed them as the Book of Mormon before returning them to the angel. To translate the inscriptions, which were written in 400 AD by a pre-Columbian prophet in a language Smith called Reformed Egyptian, he used two stones bound by silver bows which he found along with the plates. He would place the stones in his hat, bury his face in the hat, and dictate the text to his wife. Meanwhile the plates themselves lay wrapped in linen, sometimes in another room.

Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. According to the book, Israelite tribes traveled by boat to America before the birth of Jesus, and Native Americans are actually descendants of Israelites. They brought horses and steel and other things not known to exist in the Americas at that time. After the death and resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus came to America to repeat his teachings to the lost tribes of Israel and to establish a peaceful society (which didn’t last). God lives on a planet called Kolob, where a day lasts a thousand years (according to transcriptions Smith made of Egyptian scrolls that came through his town in an 1835 traveling mummy exhibition).

Mormons who have participated in a special temple ceremony to prepare themselves to be “kings and priests” or “queens and priestesses” in the afterlife wear sacred knee-high undergarments under their clothes at all times. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has over 13 million members worldwide. There exists some criticism of the Mormon movement.