Scientology and the Great American Eclipse, 2024 edition
Is it really less than a week away, this singular day that we’ve been looking forward to for nearly seven years now?
In August 2017, your Proprietor flew to Portland to join his stepbrother, and we then picked up author, former Scientology marketing genius, and Underground Bunker luminary Jefferson Hawkins for a drive into the Oregon backcountry.
The next morning, the three of us, standing in a farmer’s field with hundreds of other people, witnessed the Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017, with just over two minutes of totality.
It was an incredible experience, and one we’d hungered for ever since we were clouded out in France in 1999 (long story).
Jefferson snapped this great shot of the sun’s corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, which only becomes visible after the moon lines up perfectly in front of it.
And although we were a bit frantic, trying to make the most of our two minutes of totality, we had time to take this shot of Jefferson himself with the eclipsed sun behind him.
What an experience that was, and we’ve been hungering to stand once again in the shadow of the Moon ever since.
On Monday, we’ll hopefully get that chance, and once again we’ll be with another Underground Bunker leading light. Who? We’re not telling just yet!
And we say “hopefully,” because at this point, the weather is not looking very good for April 8. We are making offerings to the weather gods and hoping things turn out OK.
We want to encourage our readers, if any of you have the chance to get into the totality zone by Monday, please consider it. A partial eclipse, even one with over 90 percent of the sun covered, just isn’t anything like what it is to stand under a totally eclipsed sun. And no, you don’t need cameras or any other kind of equipment.
We did snap some photos and take some video in 2017, but honestly, we’re so glad we had the sense to reserve some of the time simply to stand and look around and soak up the feeling as the moon moving in front of the sun made us feel more connected to the solar system and galaxy we live in than anything else we’ve ever experience. Seriously, it’s incredible!
OK, so we have our fingers crossed that things go well Monday, and we look forward to your reports from the field.
In the meantime, we know this is a news website about Scientology, and experiencing eclipses with former Scientologists maybe doesn’t quite count.
So, just for fun we searched through L. Ron Hubbard’s entire library of lectures, and found that only one time did he refer to a solar eclipse (rather than simply using the adjective “eclipsed”).
It was in 1962, as part of the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, and when we dug it up, we actually thought it was a real hoot.
Here then is the Great Thetan spouting off about his prowess at destroying computers.
From “3GA Goal Finding, Part 1,” October 11, 1962
Remember, a thetan can look, but a machine can’t look unless a thetan is looking at the machine to read the answer off of the machine. This is something that the scientist uniformly overlooks.
The psychologist’s dissertation on how the eye works is one of the damnedest pieces of buffoonery which has ever been perpetrated as a hoax — I mean, as a fact, it is! It’s a piece of buffoonery. According to this, the eye looks out here, it points in that direction, and by some focal system of images — which of course he gets out of the science of optics — there is some kind of a screen back here which registers the image. And then we don’t say any more about it.
But carrying through this, reductio ad absurdum, we get a screen looking at a screen and then we would get another screen looking at a screen. And then we’d get another screen looking at that screen, and another screen looking at that screen. And at no time anywhere do we have an observer. In this whole system there is no observer. I think the reason for this is the psychologist has never been able to observe. So he just discounts this very necessary thing, an observer.
You know, I did this one time with a UNIVAC, ENIAC smick-smack thingamabob whatnot that was going round and round and its wheels were churning, and its valves were popping, and I think it had cooling systems and so forth to cool off its fevered brow. And it had all kinds of instrumentations which crossed instrumentations.
I busted the machine by the way. I did. I fed it “two times two equals . . .” and it was unable to solve this problem. That was the end of it. The things went round, and they went round, and there was no ‘W’ to fall out, see?
It was set up to have a more complex equation. And that was too fundamental an equation. Now, it could have said, “Two times two equals four,” if you had first said, “The derivative integral of Y in its ratio to X is the distance between G and its square root of Q. And if this were true, then two plus two or two times two equals what number?” See, the machine is set up to take that many.
This just left all the blank files over here, see. And the machine looked in vain, it couldn’t find anything there, so it looked again. And couldn’t find anything there. And it looked again, you see, and it never would pick up the “Two times two.” The cams were going mad inside the thing. They had to shut the thing off.
Spoke to me rather crossly. And they said, “This machine was not designed to solve things of that character.” It was an astronomical computational machine. It had the distances to the moon, and the lunar positions thereof, as expostulated from the eclipse of something or other, you know, and this was all fed in. And of course the cams couldn’t “Two times two equals four.”
“Well, let me point out something,” I said. “Let me point out something here. The machine never has seen an answer.”
“Ho-ho-ho-ho, nah-ha-ha-ha, nah-ha-ha-ha.’ nah-ha … !’
I said, “Wait a minute now. That machine has never seen an answer.”
“Well,” they said, “seeing you’re just using some offhanded trickery or … It’s your writing background showing up, you know, just using semantic trickery, or . . . ”
“No, no. It never has. Who reads the answer when given up by the machine?”
“Well,” they said, “the operator.”
I said, “Then the operator is part of the machine.”
“No! No, no. No! No, no.”
“All right, then if the operator isn’t part of the machine, then the machine has never inspected the answer.”
“No, that couldn’t be true.”
You see, that just led up the garden path on this. You had. you put an observer into any of these systems and they go to pieces. You’ve got to have an observer.
Oh, that Ron. Outsmarting early computers with his basic math. We’re sure this happened, just the way he told it. Sounds legit.
Anyway, we hope you have plans to see the eclipse, and we’ll tell you more about our plans as the big date nears.
Clear skies!
Catherine Bell at LRH Birthday 2022
Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader, we can add Catherine Bell to the celebs who attended the 2022 L. Ron Hubbard Birthday Event, which was held that year in the auditorium of the Fort Harrison Hotel.
This was the photo that we posted on Sunday…
And our reader brought up the woman that appears to the right of opera singer James Barbour.
With that image blown up a bit, and next to a photo of actress Catherine Bell, we have to say it does look like a match…
Bell is an interesting Scientology celebrity because she’s in a relationship with a woman, and Scientology is deeply homophobic, going back to founder L. Ron Hubbard’s description of homosexuality as a “perversion” in Dianetics.
But we must always keep in mind that Scientology celebrities get to break all the rules, and Bell can remain a famous member in good standing whatever her situation at home.
Thank you, reader, for your vigilance!
Meanwhile, another reader pointed out that behind Nancy Cartwright, they spotted Australian actress Emma Booth and her husband, musician Dominick Joseph Luna.
What do you think, gang? Looks like a pretty close match to us.
Chris Shelton is going Straight Up and Vertical
Want to help?
Please consider joining the Underground Bunker as a paid subscriber. Your $7 a month will go a long way to helping this news project stay independent, and you’ll get access to our special material for subscribers. Or, you can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal contribution to bunkerfund@tonyortega.org, an account administered by the Bunker’s attorney, Scott Pilutik. And by request, this is our Venmo link, and for Zelle, please use (tonyo94 AT gmail). E-mail tips to tonyo94@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:
Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology
Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain
Here’s the link to today’s post at tonyortega.org
And whatever you do, subscribe to this Substack so you get our breaking stories and daily features right to your email inbox every morning.
Paid subscribers get access to two special podcast series…
Up the Bridge: A journey through Scientology’s actual “technology”
Group Therapy: Our round table of rowdy regulars on the week’s news
Very funny, Ron, throw in computers all the way from Charles Babbage's mechanical versions of the 19th century to the big tube (valve) versions of the mid 20th. You didn't understand any of them.
I just asked the stupid artificially intelligent CoPilot the same question, in English, and it didn't hesitate long to give me the right answer. Along with a snarky comment! Seemingly some overly clever engineer patched the flaws in the system that allowed Hubbard to foul it up, either in the 50s (Univac) or the 40s (Eniac) or simply in his fevered imagination.
Alan Turing surmised that one day a computer could be programmed to respond to simple English questions, indistinguishably from a human behind the keyboard. Like that old techie joke "4 years ago I couldn't even spell Enjuneeir! Now I are one!" Now we have "computers" (or at least networks of servers composed of computers) that can answer English questions, passing the Turing Test. Sort of.
But not really, any idiot can easily spot the flaws in imitated natural language. Just as artificial sugar tastes bitter, there truly is nothing more stupid than artificial intelligence.
The idea of asking computers questions really derives from the old Alley Oop comics, where old Doc Wonmug would type in a question and read the answer on a strip of paper. If you can't conceive of how to program a computer, either by setting gears in certain positions, plugging in patch cords, punching buttons or sitting at a teletype making paper tapes or card decks, you have no idea how to pose a question that the computer can answer. In the 60s time period of the lecture, you would probably program in Fortran or Cobol on a punched card deck. "2 times 2=" is certainly not legal Fortran and would just throw an error, but you could easily do something like I=2 * 2, PRINT I. Not much later they invented Forth, where "2*2?" happily prints out 4 right there in your console.
Yes, Virginia, there are still machines that use Forth! My non-disclosure agreements prevent me from commenting further.
At any rate, Hubbard only displays his ignorance by bragging about it. Classic Hubbard. Later on, he did an entire lecture where he had Ron Clifford typing in questions to a faked computer and reading off answers. Ron's Journal 38 or some such? Today you could actually do it and get "answers" that are just as good as the internet cesspool they used to train the AI. Progress!
We only had to drive about 100 or so miles to totality in 2017. It really was breathtaking. I got awesome photos. What was more awesome was the way nature reacted. The cows in a nearby field started mooning like they had been caught unawares with nightfall, crickets began to chirp. A total eclipse is really awesome. We will only get 63% this time, anyone who is in a position to view the totality, don’t miss it.