'Greeley Panorama' from Opportunity's Fifth Martian Winter (False Color) / NASA

That patched together image of Mars has understandably been gaining plenty of attention over the last 24 hours. It is kind of amazing.

While we’re expected to believe that those are the tracks of Nasa’s Exploration Rover, pulling donuts on the Martian tarmac perhaps, I’m sure I’m not the only one who looks at those marks and hears the words of L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, float through my head.

The distance between panorama and paranormal is not all that great. If you squint, especially.

From his famous “Role of Earth” address in 1952 (transcript and audio here):

The Martian operation is a fascinating operation, simply because it has gone into 100 percent holding force. And it does everything it does with tremendous coversion. It’s sitting behind a defense screen of enormous size, and nobody – it’s practically impossible to penetrate that, except as a thetan. And if you penetrate it as a thetan, you go through the Martian screen, and they got you!

There’s more. Get this:

I’m talking about officers, they’re a pretty high order of thetan. So, here’s a doll. He’s monitoring this doll. And he parked his doll and picked up one of the persons connected with the ruling house of Hapsburg and went on a survey of the domain, and took notes on it. And unfortunately, he didn’t have any foggy notion of how violently this particular prince was hated. And this prince was assassinated. And before this officer could disconnect and so forth, the thetan charge which suddenly sprung up in the assassinated prince, KABOOM!, was sufficient to overwhelm and overpower this officer momentarily, and he went through the screen.

I’m telling you this because it’s an average story, not a spectacular story, not because it’s different, but because it’s the same.

And he went through the screen, KABOOM! And he landed on an installation – well, about a few hundred miles north of the equator (what you would consider north, just trying to translate the words and directions) on Mars. Boom! He went through. And the Martians “Oh, boy! What have we got here? Ha Ha! Wonderful, Wonderful! A high volume thetan! He must be a space officer from some place or other.”

So, they took a couple of standards, put them down at the foot of the cell and so forth, because they have a good identification through a body in pawn and so forth, and they decided they were going to use him back here against Earth. He wouldn’t transport! So they just threw him in the clink, you might say, and kept him there. Just kept him there and kept him there an kept him there and kept him there.

And one fine day he took the body in pawn and threw it through the guard screen and blew it up – was able to do this – and himself got free on the back-concussion, you see, of this explosion, and went out.

He went back down to a station we’ll call “X” and said, “Where have I been for the last twenty-seven years! Hmph!” Something of – on the order, “You should ask!” And he wrote out a chit, and they got a couple of cruisers and they put together a few commando forces and they took that installation to pieces – but thoroughly to pieces. And they took what Martians were in that installation and so forth, and put them in cans. As far as anybody knows, they’re still up there. But blew this thing practically off the face of the map. Most Martian stations are much tougher than this to crack.

That’s an incident of the tiniest character in a person operating … Now, I’m telling you that incident because it’s a fairly modern incident in the last few hundred years.

Also this:

As far as the Martian operation is concerned – ha! I mean, let’s all go out and play hopscotch – something real serious. A bunch of old, fat boobs sitting around in the dirt, playing big, important games.

You see what I’m getting at? No? No.

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise and his fellow Scientologists are reportedly unhappy about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master.

From the New York Daily News:

A source familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson ’s film about the founder of a Scientology-like religious movement tells us officials of the controversial church group “hit the roof” when they learned — presumably through Cruise — that the movie contains a scene which suggests the belief system was little more than a product of the leader’s fertile imagination.

In May, Anderson, who is friends with Cruise and directed him in “Magnolia,” the 1999 film that earned Cruise a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination — reportedly screened his film for the “Rock of Ages” star.

“The Master” is said to be loosely based on the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the founder of a 1950s religious movement called The Cause.