A
Piece of
Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed is a
book written in 1990 by Jon Atack, investigating L. Ron Hubbard and his enterprises such as Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. The book is critical of Scientology, its origins and leadership. In the book, Atack noted that Paulette Cooper''s The Scandal of Scientology fascinated him, and was his motivation to do more research on the subject.
Before the book had even been released, Scientology attorneys sought to have a stop put to it in
court.Their efforts were unsuccessful. In 1995, a British court found Atack guilty of libel against Margaret Hodkin, the headmistress of Scientology''s Greenfields School in the U.K. and issued an injunction against Atack forbidding him from publishing the offending paragraph on page 336 of the book. The paragraph, however, is available to be read in full on the court injunction itself. The origin of the title A Piece of Blue Sky is explained at the beginning of the book “ It was 1950, in the early, heady days of Dianetics, soon after L. Ron Hubbard opened the doors of his first organization to the clamoring crowd. Up until then, Hubbard was known only to readers of pulp fiction, but now he had an instant best-seller with a book that promised to solve every problem of the human mind, and the cash was pouring in. Hubbard found it easy to create schemes to part his new following from their money. One of the first tasks was to arrange "grades" of membership, offering supposedly greater rewards, at increasingly higher prices. Over thirty years later, an associate wryly remembered Hubbard turning to him and confiding, no doubt with a smile, "Let''s sell these people a piece of blue sky."
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