The book, Battlefield Earth, is a tedious, third rate novel written in a 1940's style of pulp sci-fi. The only reason this book has any attention whatsoever is due to expensive PR hype and outright fraud by the scientology front, Bridge Publications. It has no appreciable readership in the real world. Also, it's convoluted, tortured plot and poor character development does lend itself well to adapting to the big screen. Under normal circumstances, this book would never have seen the light of day, let alone been made into a movie. The movie script was unanimously turned down by all knowledgeable people in the field.

This begs the question. Why was this book made into a movie?

What was the logic behind CRT's authorizing and pushing to make a movie based on Hubbard's, 'Battlefield Earth', that was certainly destined to become a box office failure?

To answer this question, one has to look back to the period when it was first proposed. Scientology had received a serious blow to it's credibility with the widespread release of it's space alien cosmology and illegal internal practices. Somehow, they had to distance themselves from this fiasco. Looking at the history of Hubbard and his cult, it can be seen that whenever they get caught or accused of misdeeds, they immediately attempt to deflect criticism by pointing to similar misdeeds perpetrated by other agencies to cloud and confuse the issue. It's the classic "smoke and mirrors" routine practiced by magicians. This is the common factor in ALL of scientology's dealings with criticisms of any sort.

The main thrust of making BE into a movie was damage control. They hoped to confuse the public's image of scientology being a "UFU cult" by broadly disseminating and publishing Hubbard's sci-fi writings and stating it had no connection with it's "religious" teachings. The fact of the matter is, there is little or no difference. Any reasonable critical thinking person, with full access to scientology's secret higher levels, would find it hard to differentiate between the "religious" aspects of the cult and his old fashioned sci-fi space opera.

This very risky plan might have definitely succeeded 15 years ago. At that time, they had almost full control of the press with their abuse of the legal system as a tool of intimidation. Even the largest and most independent publications were afraid to write any negative reports about the cult. But this is 2000 and the free exchange of information on the internet has changed the playing field.

They failed to take this into account due to the rigid thinking which has been deeply instilled in followers by Hubbard's teachings. This inflexibility invariably leads to those classic "foot bullets" we see so often here. This faulty reasoning is also amply demonstrated by Travolta's machinations to produce BE against all advice to the contrary.

Whether or not this plan will be successful remains to be seen. Travolta has lied on public record by categorically denying there is a space alien component (in OTIII and higher) to scientology. Miscavige has been gradually rewriting the "scriptures" to downplay this aspect as well.

We can also expect to see more "Claires" hatted to post misleading statements here to create confusion in the public's mind as to what the true nature of scientology is.

A good statistic to use would be to compare the number of BE reviews that deny the connection of scientology to it's space alien cosmology to those that point it out. The bad reviews of the film itself are irrelevant. In fact, they can even be taken to be a "Big Win" - Hubbard himself said bad publicity is better than none at all.

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