BUSTED! Scientology photoshopped Tom Cruise & John Travolta out of event pics

Hollywood actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta were digitally removed from the audience in photos of a recent Scientology event, our analysis shows.

Earlier this week, journalist Tony Ortega broke the news on The Underground Bunker that Scientology mega stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta could be seen in the audience at this year’s L. Ron Hubbard birthday celebration event. It’s the first time both actors have been seen together at a Scientology gathering in seven years, with the last dual-sighting dating back to 2019.

The Hollywood A-listers are well known for their involvement in Scientology, however it appears the church has made efforts to cover up the fact they were both sat in the front row at their most recent international gathering.

We carefully analysed photographs published by the Church of the March 14th event and found several instances where both Cruise and Travolta appear to have been digitally erased from the audience.

In an image shared earlier this week by The Underground Bunker, the stars can be seen giving a standing ovation to reclusive church leader David Miscavige alongside fellow Scientology celeb Jenna Elfman, rapper Doug E. Fresh and mega-donors Craig Jensen and Trish Duggan.

L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday is seen as a landmark event in the Scientology calendar with Miscavige using the occasion to announce the church’s latest programs and ‘expansion’ projects to his loyal followers. Although Hubbard died in 1986, Scientologists from across the world still travel to the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida every March to hear Miscavige speak. Travolta is frequently seen in the audience, but Tom Cruise usually only shows up for the annual IAS gathering which takes place in October at Saint Hill Manor, Hubbard’s former home and Scientology’s UK headquarters in East Grinstead, Sussex.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the photos shared by Scientology from this year’s birthday event.

First up, here’s one taken from the back of the hall looking towards the stage. Based on the image shared by Tony Ortega, we could identify exactly where in the front row Cruise and Travolta were sat, and zoomed in to notice they were missing. So we increased the brightness, decreased the contrast and low and behold: a big black splodge appeared that doesn’t seem to match with its surroundings.

Next, this photo was taken from the left of the audience facing the stage. Again, altering the brightness and contrast revealed a strange dark shape right where we were expecting to see Cruise and Travolta. We also noticed a curved skin-coloured mark appearing to hover in front of a lady’s face.

Based on the colour, shape and location it looks as though whoever edited the photo may have missed part of the back of Travolta’s head during the removal process.

There’s also this angle, which on first glance just looks like there was just an empty seat. Perhaps whoever was sat there had momentarily left the room to use the bathroom.. but zooming in and again, adjusting the brightness and contrast, we can see a repeating pattern that is often a hallmark of an image being digitally altered.

In low light conditions, there is a limit to how much information a camera’s sensor can capture of any given scene. The camera therefore has to boost the signal it receives in order to create a usable image, resulting in an effect known as camera noise, where dark objects lose detail and random coloured pixels give the photo a grainy look.

However, genuine camera noise is uniform across the image and zooming in, we can see a repeating pattern and a subtle difference in background colour that resembles the shape of digital brush marks. In photo-editing software like Photoshop, a common way of removing objects is to use a Clone Stamp tool which allows you to select another part of the image (often the background) and duplicate it over the part you want to remove.

When applied to a small part of a much larger image it can often go un-noticed, but careful analysis of this picture reveals a repeating pattern of diagonal lines which aren’t consistent with the noise in the rest of the image.

And finally, we took a closer look at this photo taken from behind David Miscavige looking out at the audience. At first glance it looks like there was an empty seat on the front row where Tom Cruise had been sitting and again, we thought maybe he had decided to leave the auditorium before the photo was taken. However, it appears Scientology’s PR department instead simply removed him from the image.

Sat in the second row are Dr. David Minkoff and his wife Sue, parents of Real Housewives of New York cast member Rebecca Minkoff. David temporarily lost his medical licence in 2001 due to his involvement in the tragic death of Scientologist Lisa McPherson and is currently being sued in another wrongful death case after Whitney Mills, a high-level Scientologist was denied mental health treatment and subsequently committed suicide in May 2022.

Standing next to her husband, Sue Minkoff can be seen immediately behind Tom Cruise in the Ortega photo and her distinctive blonde, curly hair allowed us to easily locate her in the shot looking out at the audience from behind Miscavige.

Bot zoom in and three things stand out. First, there’s her face. Look closely and you can see a straight line cutting off the tip of her nose and the bottom of her nostrils. Next there’s her right arm, which appears to be noticeably thinner than her left, with her wrist, forearm and the bottom of her palm missing in place of yet another peculiarly straight line.

It’s worth noting that although the side of an arm can appear to be straight from some angles, taking into account the slightly out-of-focus audience and camera noise we would expect some blurring around the line and not a harsh, pixel-perfect vertical cut.

Also strange are the two greyish-brown spots that appear below her neck. On the right hand side, a splodge overlaps her arm and both of them share a perfectly straight horizontal line below. To us, it looks like somebody has used Photoshop’s marquee tool to remove a rectangular area in front of Mrs. Minkoff, which just so happens to be where Tom Cruise was sitting.

But perhaps most telling of all is the extra arm situated between the Minkoffs and seemingly not attached to a body. We’ve checked and double checked, and we’re pretty certain we can account for the arms of all the audience members in the vicinity, but this one appears to be rogue.

We also paid careful attention to David’s suit jacket but the colours, shading and shape are not consistent with what we would expect to see if it were a crease or a fold in the fabric.

To us, it looks like Tom Cruise is applauding and we can see his right shoulder, upper arm and elbow with his forearm raised and disappearing behind Sue’s arm, which has been artificially overlayed where Tom was standing. Coincidentally based on these proportions, where the top of his head would be in this image matches up perfectly with the strange line that cuts off the bottom of Sue’s nose.

This isn’t the first time Scientology has been caught doctoring images. In January 2000 the Washington Post reported the church had extensively edited photos of a similar event in an apparent attempt to make the audience appear larger than it actually was. The same attendees could be seen multiple times in the same image, the article says “the touch-up work left one doppelganger parishioner with no head. In another shot a bald man who had been replicated magically grew hair.”

A Scientology representative at the time told reporters it “was just a goof when they put it up on the Web” and that it had been later corrected, maintaining the event was “absolutely packed…there wasn’t an empty seat.”

And in 2013, former Scientology spokesperson Mike Rinder revealed on his blog that photos published by the Church showing the crowd at the opening ceremony of their ‘Ideal Org’ in Portland had been altered for a similar purpose. “If you look closely under the confetti you will the the entire crowd there is on a slightly different perspective than the rest of the photo. Photoshopping in an audience and then covering them in confetti to hide the low quality work – what is vulture culture coming to?”

Scientology also erased L. Ron Hubbard’s wife Sara from a photo that first appeared in the Miami Daily News in 1946. In the original, Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard are pictured together at the wheel of a sailboat they had purchased.. but when the Church published a book about their founder’s life as a “master mariner” in 2013, his wife had been removed from the image entirely.

As Tony Ortega wrote, Hubbard hadn’t divorced his previous wife when he married Sara in 1946. “But his bigamy didn’t become public until 1951 when, a year after Ron and Sara had had a child together (Alexis, who arrived just a few weeks before Dianetics did in May 1950), Sara sued for divorce and went public with accusations that her husband was a lunatic.”

“Hubbard did his best to erase Sara Northrup and Alexis from the record of his life.”

Tom Cruise and John Travolta have long been known for their Scientology involvement and both are seen as celebrity ambassadors for the church. It’s no secret that they attend events – as demonstrated by Cruise’s dramatic arrival by helicopter to the annual IAS gala in the United Kingdom. But photos of the pair together are bound to generate media interest, something we can only assume the church wanted to minimise in light of the numerous allegations of abuse reported by former members and ongoing lawsuits that allege human trafficking, harassment and false imprisonment.

Only instead of avoiding taking photos of them at this latest event, they opted to erase them using Photoshop.. and did a sloppy job of it too.