The Profit was written and directed by Peter Alexander, who spent 20 years in the Scientology cult and gave over $1 million to the organization. Alexander is a former executive at Universal City Studios, and was the creator of several famous theme park rides, including Back to the Future, Jaws, and ET. He and his crew suffered intense harassment from Scientology agents while making the film. When the movie debuted at Cannes in 2001, all the copies of the trailers were stolen.

[...] Alexander, a soft-spoken former vice president of Universal Studios who now lives near Clearwater, attained the Church's second-highest level of spiritual awakening, OT VII, or Operating Thetan level seven, before he defected in 1997. At one point, Alexander says, he was so consumed with Scientology that he carried around a Church-issued beeper that alerted him whenever his minders decided he required counseling. Greenway, a no-nonsense blonde with a pack-a-day voice and an easy laugh, was never a Scientologist. Alexander hired her in the mid-'90s at his architectural design firm, which at the time was run using Hubbard's principles; she resisted the workplace pressure to join Scientology and eventually convinced Alexander to leave the Church. They both joined the board of the Lisa McPherson Trust—a now-defunct anti-Scientology organization that battled the Church in Clearwater for years—and made a feature-length film called The Profit about a megalomaniacal leader named L. Conrad Powers who founds the Church of Scientific Spiritualism.

Greenway and Alexander have steered clear of downtown Clearwater for several months and fear that if they're spotted in the area, the Church will unleash private investigators on them (as they claim it has in the past), and that a new wave of troubling phone calls and attempts to meddle with their business will commence. This strikes me as paranoid. Eventually, we park the car and get out. Alexander points to a Greek-columned stone building that once housed the town bank. It is now the headquarters of the Office of Special Affairs, the Church's public relations arm and current incarnation of the Guardian Office, which was the epicenter of the black-bag hijinks for which Scientology is famous—infiltrating the Department of Justice, hatching schemes (which were never fully realized) to blackmail critics, bugging IRS offices, and so forth. A discreetly posted security camera peeks out from atop the building. "They've got 110 cameras downtown," Alexander says. "Just wait."

Within minutes, a paunchy middle-age Latino man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing khakis and a white golf shirt, emerges from the adjoining parking lot. He walks silently to a spot a few feet away from us, points a digital camera, and begins snapping our picture. I say hello. He says nothing. I ask him if he's a member of the Church. He stares, grim-faced, at the camera's LCD screen. Alexander and Greenway are casual; they've been through this before.

As we continue down the sidewalk, a bus with tinted windows passes by. Greenway explains that it's a Scientology bus. The Church leaders don't trust the staff to own cars, she says, and they don't want them walking around with entheta, either.

Greenway points across the street. The venetian blinds in the storefront opposite have been opened to reveal an office with at least half a dozen people inside. One of them, a clean-cut young man, is standing by the window, pointing a video camera, and slowly pivoting to keep us in the frame as we make our way down Cleveland Street. [...]

When Peter Alexander joined the Church of Scientology at age 29 in 1977, he didn't view it as religion. Like many others, he started with the church's life-improvement courses and counseling sessions.

He saw results immediately. He quit smoking, a habit he'd kept for 10 years. His chronic bronchitis disappeared. He felt euphoric.

''I thought, Wow, this stuff really works,'' said Alexander, now 58 and a theme park designer in Tampa. ``It seemed very high-minded. It was all about communication and freeing people.''

Nearly 20 years and $1 million later, Alexander wondered what he'd gotten into. The counselling sessions, which involved a Scientologist asking Alexander question after question in a hypnotic repetition, took a bizarre turn. As he progressed to the highest levels of Scientology, Alexander said he was trained to communicate with dead space aliens, called body thetans.

''The fact that I couldn't find any space aliens started to bother me,'' Alexander said in a series of interviews with The Herald. ``That kind of broke the bubble.''

Even then, Alexander said it took three years for him to leave Scientology.

MAN #1: Now Peter, you said you were in there for 20 years; what woke you up and got you out of there?

PETER ALEXANDER: Well, actually, one of my employees, Patricia Greenway, got interested in Scientology, and she got on the Internet and she found out the truth. I was impressed by L. Ron Hubbard's background, I thought he was a nuclear physicist; it turned out he flunked out of college. I thought he was a naval hero; it turned out he was removed from command of every command he was given and he was kind of a mess-up. And so once I started to learn truth after truth, you know--I believed that the processes were some sort of advanced science; then I learned they were hypnotism. And once the whole story began to unravel, I thought, "Uh-oh, this is bad, this is a cult; what am I doing?"

MAN #1: How much money did you give them personally?

PETER ALEXANDER: I gave them a million dollars--

[Interview with Peter Alexander: MP3 (8.3 MiB)]

Imagine a church so dangerous, you must sign a release form before you can receive its "spiritual assistance." This assistance might involve holding you against your will for an indefinite period, isolating you from friends and family, and denying you access to appropriate medical care. You will of course be billed for this treatment - assuming you survive it. If not, the release form absolves your caretakers of all responsibility for your suffering and death. Welcome to the Church of Scientology.

PETER ALEXANDER: Well, as Stacy Brooks, Patricia Greenway and I went looking for the office space, we were pursued by up to three carloads of Scientology hired private investigators and, uh, they would take down the, um, address of every place we went to, and then they would go talk to the landlords and tell them that, um, if they rented to the Lisa McPherson Trust they would have nothing but trouble. Now, it was interesting that each and every building down there has 20 to 30 to 40 percent vacancy rates. I mean, they're not full by any stretch of the imagination, and they all agreed to rent to us, um, and then changed their minds.

This process of "Black P.R," while credited to L. Ron Hubbard, was actually an invention of Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels. Goebbels believed that you could create any kind of lie, and if you spread it amongst enough people, it would become the truth. While Goebbels may have have invented this process, L. Ron Hubbard and his scumbags have brought it to a new low.