Floating limbs without bodies: more bad Scientology photoshopping

Back in April, we analysed photos published by the Church of Scientology that had been heavily doctored in an apparent attempt to remove Tom Cruise and John Travolta from the front row of an event and make the audience seem larger than it actually was. Strange black splodges and a floating arm not attached to a body were the tell-tale signs, and now it appears they’ve been at it again.

Over the weekend Scientologists descended upon Clearwater, Florida for a ceremony to mark the groundbreaking of a controversial new 3,500 seat auditorium dedicated to their founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The proposed facility has been fiercely opposed by local residents, with over 7,000 people signing a petition urging the City Council not to sell a public street to the Church, which it claimed was needed in order to make way for the development. Instead of selling the parcel of land for the original $1.4 million offered, the Council instead gave it away for free, paving the way for works to begin on what will eventually become the future home of Scientology’s frequent large international events.

At present Scientology hosts three major gatherings each year, hosted by reclusive leader Captain David Miscavige: a new year’s event typically held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California; the L. Ron Hubbard birthday celebration in March, which takes place at the Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida; and the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) anniversary event in October, at their UK headquarters near East Grinstead, Sussex. According to promotional materials published by the church all of these major events will move to the new purpose-built hall in Florida once it is completed, despite the church also recently securing permission to redevelop huge swathes of their Saint Hill compound in England – including the creation of a new mega car park and the erection of three mammoth event structures in order to facilitate the IAS event.

Speaking at a Mid-Sussex District Council Planning Committee meeting, Councillor John Dabell voiced concerns about the development being situated in a protected Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB, now known as a National Landscape). “One way or another they have continued, in my opinion, to find a way to do what they want.”

Similarly in Clearwater, Scientology has been engaging in what local residents describe as a ‘plan to take over the city’ with former Vice Mayor Mark Bunker telling us last year “Since 2017, the current leader of Scientology, David Miscavige, started a secret plan to to buy up all the available property downtown and just sit on it and leave it empty for what, 8 years now, thwarting any attempts that we have made as a city to revive the downtown.” He warned: “We’re going to do what we want to do, that’s their attitude. You can’t stop us.”

With the City Council finally caving in to Scientology’s demands, an official groundbreaking ceremony was held last weekend to mark the start of the construction phase for their new L. Ron Hubbard Hall. We carefully analysed the photos taken of the event which were uploaded to the church’s website and once again, found evidence that suggests they have been heavily doctored.

First up, it’s a floating leg seemingly standing without being attached to a body. Look closely and you will notice it appears to match the colour, shape and crease marks of the right leg of the man standing beside it, who is wearing a light shirt and a navy suit jacket. Closer inspection of the man’s legs and it becomes apparent they have been badly cropped and he is missing the lower half of his right leg. This suggests Scientology have moved his body slightly to the right and forgotten to tidy up the evidence. Why might they have done this? We have two theories: either they were trying to hide a celebrity or hoping to close the gap between him and the person to his left in order to reduce the appearance of empty space – a common trick used when trying to make an audience appear larger than it actually was.

Next, we found two more examples of bad cropping, resulting in one audience member losing a hand, and another gaining an elbow. In the image on the left, which is blurry because we had o zoom in to notice it, a gentleman is seen clapping.. however his left hand has been abruptly cut off and replaced with what appears to be the marks of a clone tool, commonly used to repeat background textures in Photoshop.

On the right, we can see a floating elbow seemingly not attached to a body. Both arms of the lady wearing the red dress are visible, and there isn’t enough space between her and the man in the blue suit for it to belong to somebody standing between them. How very strange.

In this photo, the entire front row of the audience appears to have been digitally removed, with blue splodges – again, reminiscent of the Photoshop Clone Tool – overlapping the back and sides of people’s heads. On the right, the man in a light blue suit also appears to have extraordinarily long fingers on his right hand, but no finger tips on his left.

The repeating blue pattern, which doesn’t quite match up with the texture of the fabric covering the front of the stage in front tends to suggest a sample area has been selected, and then used to paint a repeating pattern to remove the entire front row of the audience. This effect is something that can only be achieved through photo editing software and shares a striking resemblance to Scientology’s attempts to remove Tom Cruise and John Travolta from the front row of another event held earlier this year.

Now this one is just strange. A lady in the crowd stood out to us initially due to her disproportionate size, compared to her neighbouring attendees. But look again, and you may notice the lady in the white top is facing the wrong way. Wider angled photos show this portion of the audience was sandwiched between the main stage and a separate area filled with dirt which was used for the ceremonial first shovel part of the event. The people seen in the bottom right corner are standing on the second stage holding shovels, with some members of the audience facing that way. Others are facing the opposite direction towards the big screen on the main stage, which was showing a live feed of the event.. However this unusually tall lady is standing at a 90 degree angle to everybody else.

But zoom in, and it only gets weirder. Although we can just about make out what appears to be a backwards-facing white baseball cap it appears to float behind her face rather than on top of her head.. and we have never seen anybody with a face quite that shape. Her eyes appear to be wonky, while her mouth seems disproportionally large.. and simply in the wrong place. This could be attributed to camera distortion due to the wide angled lens being used, however typically we would only expect to see this effect around the edges of the wider photo and it would equally distort the faces of everybody in the area, rather than just one individual in the centre of the crowd.. so we’re not quite sure what’s happened here.

Scientologists who had donated at least $1 million towards the LRH Hall project (known as Legion of Honor members) were given golden shovels and invited to step forward and participate in the ceremonial turning of the first earth. According to Scientology’s press release there were over 100 such people at the event, however their photos make it hard to verify due to yet more hallmarks of digital manipulation. On the left, a hand can be seen holding one of the shovels in the air however its handle appears to be missing. Similarly, the shovel behind appears to have been edited.

On the right, Scientology’s biggest donor Trish Duggan can be seen standing in front of a darkened glass pane separating her from the audience behind. If you look closely at the glass, it is semi-transparent on one side, but completely black on the other. To us, it looks like an attempt has been made to remove somebody who was standing in front of the right side of the glass, which has been painted over with a black paint brush in photo-editing software.

There’s more to examine in this picture, but first lets take a look at some other peculiarities spotted in other parts of the same photo.

The top image shows the wider photo, marked with 1, 2, and 3. Photo 1 shows David Miscavige, Scientology’s reclusive leader who led the celebration. However, he appears to have been added in digitally. It’s possible he was standing there when the photo was taken, but this looks to us like a composite of two photos.. Maybe he was blinking? We can tell by his shadow. If you look carefully, the outside of his body has a halo which follows his trouser line almost perfectly and extends along the edge of his jacket. This is something we would expect to see when somebody has been cut out of another image using a lasso tool and pasted on top of another image. Similarly in some places his shadow appears to be inverted, with dark areas on the ground in places where there is no obstruction to cause a shadow.. and unnatural patches of light where there should be a shadow.

The man standing to Miscavige’s right (2) also appears to have been Photoshopped into this image. Not only is he missing a shadow entirely, zoom into his feet and they appear to have been badly cropped with half of his left shoe cut off in a perfectly straight line with the end of his toes missing. This individual also has a halo around his body, which suggests it has been digitally superimposed.

Moving to photo 3, the arrows marked (A) point out where shadows are missing from behind Trish Duggan and the half-shoe man. For comparison, point (B) appears to be a genuine shadow and matches the shade, darkness and texture we see behind the other attendees.

At the arrow marked (C), the gentleman’s arm disappears into the crowd. We ran a closer pixel-level analysis of this portion of the image and it appears to lose transparency, becoming see-through directly above the darkened glass panel we pointed out earlier. This is consistent with what we might see from an inexperienced photo editor attempting to use a clone stamp or background removal tool to remove an object – or person – from an image with a complicated background.

Considering its position in relation to the glass panel, we believe a Scientology celebrity – perhaps Tom Cruise or John Travolta – was standing next to Trish Duggan and has been digitally removed in order to avoid the inevitable press coverage it would generate, as we saw last time photos leaked of them attending a Scientology event.

Scientology claims 7,000 people were there to hear Miscavige declare victory over Clearwater and announce the next phase of the long-awaited L. Ron Hubbard Hall project, which is understood to have already generated in excess of $142.5 million in donations for the church.

It does appear a sizeable crowd was present on the day, however the photos published by the church show clear signs of digital manipulation, and so cannot be trusted as a genuine or accurate depiction of real life events. Clearwater is home to Scientology’s ‘Mecca’, known as the Flag Land Base and is often cited along with Los Angeles as the two cities with the highest concentration of Scientologists on the planet. But we agree with The Underground Bunker‘s method of calculating the true attendance figures: “Our usual rule of thumb is to divide any figure Scientology published by seven, which would mean a crowd closer to 1,000.”

The only question we have is why don’t they publish the honest, real photos.. or at. the very least, do a better job at editing them?