Notice: Fredric Rice may have removed segments of the replies given to questions if they contained copyrighted materials. After a very short while, Scientology "experts" refused to answer questions and started cut-and-pasting copyrighted cult propaganda. Additionally I removed URLs in some of the replies, and left them in others. And it's also important to note that eventually the unfortunate "Greg Churilov" cultist was ejected from askme.com for his typical Scientological behavior.

mrswilson asked this question on 5/10/2000:

What's Xenu? Please only ACTUAL ANSWERS, NOT JUST FLAKEY "AVOID THE SUBJECT" WORDS...!!!!! Thanks!

honorarykid gave this response on 5/10/2000:

Xenu is a fictional character invented by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. The Xenu character plays an important role in the upper level training of Scientologists who are seeking to become Operating Thetans (OTs).

First, a little background. According to the Church of Scientology (CoS), OTs are individuals who have advanced in their Scientology coursework, to the point where they have learned to master vast, magical mental powers. An OT, according to the CoS can manipulate matter, energy, space and time through sheer force of will. He or she is free to travel about the universe at will, leaving the body behind, temporarily or permanently. OTs believe they can move objects via telekinesis, and that they can travel through time. OTs are God-like in their abilities, according to the CoS.

To become OT, Scientologists must first attain "Clear" status. At that point, they begin training to become OT.

To become fully OT, they must pass through what Hubbard called "the wall of fire" which is taught at level OT 3 (level 3 out of 8).

The wall of fire is where Scientologists finally learn the "real" causes of all their earthly and spiritual problems. They learn that what they were told about engrams as they studied Dianetics, was not actually true. They learn that the real causes of our problems are that our bodies are infested with body thetans (BTs), which are said to be the confused, disembodied spirits of hundreds or thousands of other people.

Of course, to become a fully functioning OT, one must audit out these BTs, send them packing, as it were. And for that, you need to buy BT removal auditing services from the CoS.

These BT spirits that Scientology says are stuck to human meat bodies, became disembodied, confused, and stuck, allegedly because of Xenu.

Some 75 million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of the local Galactic Federation (which, as everyone knows, encompasses the planet Earth, called Teegeeack back then).

Xenu was an evil ruler, according to Hubbard. Xenu also had an overpopulation problem in the many planets of his political realm. So he rounded up the excess population, froze the people in glycol, transported them to Teegeeack in rocket ships that looked like the commercial DC-8 jetliners flying back when Hubbard wrote level.

Curiously, Hubbard does not say how many years it took these rockets to cross interstellar space, nor how they carried enough fuel to accererate and deccelerate. He completely finessed those issues.

Anyway, Xenu then placed the frozen people into volcanic craters on Earth (Hubbard specifically mentioned Hawaii and Las Palmas volcanoes, which geologists will tell you did not exist 75 million years ago) and then detonated nuclear bombs over their heads, killing their meat bodies, vaporizing them completely, and freeing the spirit beings that were within.

If all that were not bad enough, Xenu then allegedly trapped all the now free floating Thetans with electronic ribbon traps. Since these free floating Thetans were OTs, they could astrally travel back to their home planets before the DC-8s got back, and since Xenu didn't want them back, he diabolically designed a plan to confuse them (us) and make them (us) too stupid to want to go back to the Federation.

Hubbard says that Xenu's plan called for us to be brainwashed and implanted with false memories. He did this by forcing us to watch movies, in the manner that the young droogie was brainwashed by the authorities in the book "A Clockwork Orange."

Be assured that I'm not kidding here. This is really what the "Wall of Fire" teaches. Please bear with me, we're nearing the end.

A quick side bar: Hubbard alleges that the entire religion of Christianity comes about due to one of these implanted false memories, which Hubbard called "R6." In R6, the ribbon trapped thetans were shown films of crucifixions. Hubbard taught that the effects of the R6 implant on today's society is to make us feel irrationally sympathetic to Christ's crucifixion, and this sympathy makes us predisposed to become Christians.

Hubbard clearly implies that Xenu's brainwashing of people to be sympathetic toward a crucified Chirst is really just a manupulation and control process. Hubbard is saying that in being a Christian, one is not free of Xenu's devious plans to keep Thetans subjegated. Scientology believes that only Scientology can help all the poor, brainwashed, deluded, trapped Christians become great, powerful, free OT Scientologists.

For the record, I am not a Christian. If I were, this teaching would really offend. But even as a secular person, I am offended by the lies told in Scientology's marketing hype, which claim that Scientology is fully compatible with Christianity. Scientology, at the upper levels, is decidedly hostile toward Christianity, and in fact, to all other organized religions as well.

Also, keep in mind that these bizarre Xenu and implant teachings are taught ONLY to those at the upper levels. They are not generally known by lower level adherants. I've seen Scientologists who have not yet advanced to the OT3 level deny that Scientology would ever teach stuff this goofy sounding.

But I begin to digress. To finish up the story of Xenu, according to Hubbard, some good people ("loyal officers," as Hubbard called them), within the Galactic Federation, finally realized that Xenu was a bad dude. They mounted a coup d'etat, deposed him, stripped him of his position and threw him into an electronic mountain prison, somewhere in our Galaxy, where he remains to this day.

Luckily for us, Hubbard came along in the 1950s and "discovered" what really happened. He "discovered" the "fact" that we all have been implanted by Xenu with R6, R2, and other false brainwashing implants. Hubbard then selflessly designed a program, Scientology, which will free us (for only a 'small' fee) from these delusions.

(BTW, this is the largely the same answer I provided to the question "Who is Xenu" posed by an AskMe.com participant about a month ago. I have made a few small changes to my original answer)

Further facts about this criminal empire may be found at Operation Clambake and FACTNet.

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