MAGONIA Extra

The BBC and Scientology have come into battle over a documentary to be screened tonight on BBC1.

In anticipation of its negative view of the cult they have posted a YouTube video of reporter John Sweeney losing his cool.

On the BBC website Sweeney defends his outburst:

'While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

'Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

'I have met mothers who say they have suffered Scientology "disconnects" - meaning that their children have cut them completely out of their life so that they can spend more time with an organisation which a judge in 1984 characterised as "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".'

Scientology is not a cult that should be messed with, in the past they have taken on the notoriously anarchic South Park animation series who took a poke at them.

The current battle with the BBC shows that Scientology is able to run rings round media organisations by using the Internet and by making their own videos. The BBC has to acknowledge that they are no longer a privileged source of entertainment and education for the masses, and that groups or people with alternative viewpoints now have a media voice that is independent of national and establishment control.

The extraterrestrial origins of Scientology can be viewed on the OT III Scholarship Page. The pros and cons of the 'UFO' aspects of Scientology can be viewed here.