For this post I will discuss a conspiracy that involved a Church (you may find later on that this does not constitute most people’s definition of a church). Operation Snow White, sounds as innocent as the Disney character, right? It was far from that. This was the name for the Church of Scientology’s major criminal conspiracy during the 1970s to purge disparaging records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Why would the Church conspire to eradicate these records? First I’ll provide a concise explanation of the Church of Scientology’s belief: people are immortal spiritual beings who have forgotten their true nature. Basically, the major tenet is that a human is an immortal alien spiritual being that is trapped on Earth in a physical body.

As early as 1960, L. Ron Hubbard had proposed that Scientologists should infiltrate government departments by securing jobs within many different branches. After being severely scrutinized by several U.S. Federal Agencies (such as the FBI and IRS), the Church decided to take their own action, which was unfortunately a foolish one. The decision was to infiltrate and steal any documents in government offices that were “false” and plant different false information. As you all know, this is a highly illegal operation and was exposed by the FBI in 1977. After the exposure, eleven high officials (excluding L. Ron Hubbard but including his wife) were given serious prison time.

This is an example of a rather radical “religion” taking extreme measures to cleanse their records and replace existing information in government offices with false material. The repercussion lies in the credibility of this Church. Operation Snow White painted the entire Church of Scientology in an extremely negative light and earned them significant negative opinion. Of all the accusations against the Church, it is one of the most known and certainly the farthest reaching. Now although this conspiracy may not be as high profile as some others, it is quite alarming that a “Church” without much inside connections could potentially infiltrate into government offices and eradicate or replace files with ease.