History of Scientology in Timeline

1950

Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices created by the American author L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard initially presented his ideas in 1950 as a form of talk therapy called Dianetics. He later expanded and reframed those ideas as a religion, which he named Scientology. In 1953, he founded the Church of Scientology, which, by one 2014 estimate, had around 30,000 members.

1965

Several governments have held formal inquiries into Scientology's practices. Reports examining Scientology's practices were published in Australia in 1965, New Zealand in 1969, Canada in 1970, and the UK in 1971.

1967

In 1967, Hubbard established the Sea Organization (Sea Org), an elite management group that became central to Scientology's administration. After Hubbard's death in 1986, leadership passed to David Miscavige, who consolidated control over the Church of Scientology and oversaw its continued pursuit of legal recognition and institutional expansion.

1979

The organization and officials have been involved in a number of criminal cases. The most prominent US case is United States v. Hubbard in which eleven senior staff, including Hubbard's wife, were convicted and jailed in 1979 for infiltrating US government agencies under the Church's infiltration campaign called Operation Snow White.

1986

In the US, the Church engaged in a decades-long conflict with the Internal Revenue Service before obtaining tax-exempt status in 1993. The IRS had previously found that Scientology entities conferred substantial private benefit on Hubbard and his family, a central issue in the dispute over nonprofit status. Although Hubbard's death in 1986 ended the ongoing inurement, the conflict over past tax liabilities continued for years afterward until an unconventional and secret settlement was reached.

1988

In 1988, seventy staff members in Spain, including then president of Church of Scientology International, were arrested and indicted on charges of fraud, extortion, forgery, tax evasion and violating public health laws; the case was fought for 14 years before being dismissed in 2002.

1992

Scientology was convicted in Canada in 1992 for breach of public trust and infiltration of public offices, then lost a libel case for false utterances against the prosecutor to the tune of CAD $1.6 million (equivalent to $3,127,619 in 2025).

1995

Hubbard taught that psychiatrists were responsible for a great many wrongs in the world, saying that psychiatry has at various times offered itself as a tool of political suppression and that psychiatry was responsible for the ideology of Hitler, for turning the Nazis into mass murderers, and the Holocaust. The Scientology organization operates the anti-psychiatry group Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), which operates Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, an anti-psychiatry museum. Though Hubbard had stated psychosis was not something Scientology dealt with, after noticing many Scientologists were suffering breakdowns after using his techniques he created the Introspection Rundown, a brutal and inhumane method to allegedly solve psychotic episodes. The rundown came under public scrutiny when in 1995 Scientologist Lisa McPherson suffered a mental breakdown and was removed from the hospital and held in isolation at a Church of Scientology for 17 days before she died.

1996

This has contributed to several public controversies, including criminal charges against the Church due to the death of member Lisa McPherson during the Church's brutal isolation practices for psychotic breaks, called the Introspection Rundown. In 1996, a nanny in Denmark with a history of mental illness was working for Scientologists, stopped taking her psychiatric medication in an effort to join Scientology, and subsequently mutilated and killed their 18‑month‑old twins.

1998

Switzerland courts convicted three Scientologists in 1998 on fraud and usury charges.