For anyone outside of Scientology this will sound pretty crazy. For Scientologists, this is gospel, this is real, this is the truth. Here’s Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard from the lecture “The role of Earth“:

The space stations exist out here in the solar system. They use the asteroids. It’s a very peculiar system. This solar system has a planet which is broken up, the asteroid belt. It gives a low-gravity platform for takeoff and so on, and that broken planet is of considerable interest as a space station, that is to say a galactic jump.

Now, there aren’t any planets up at this end of the galaxy which form a good galactic entering spot for incoming transport and other ships. But this beautiful, broken-up planet here with a light-gravity sun and so on, makes a very ideal spot.

And as a result, this area of the solar system got into prominence. It got into a little bit of prominence, and it’s slightly a bone of contention.

And there was – the Fourth Invader Force was here. The Fifth Invader Force came in to use this area, and the name of this solar system is Space Station 33. They started to use this area without suspecting that the Fourth Invader Force had been there for God knows how many skillion years, had been sitting down, and they have their installations up on Mars, and they have a tremendous, screened operation.

This isn’t from one of his sci-fi novels. This is part of Scientology proper. Hubbard is serious about this. He is also dead wrong. Scientologists would normally swallow everything Hubbard says without question (questioning anything he says will get a Scientologist in trouble with the Church). And who could blame them? Hubbard is known to present theories as fact – theories that cannot be disproven, and as such one may as well go ahead and believe them.

But this one is hereby blown to bits. By the magazine, “Universe Today” in an article titled, “Why isn’t the asteroid belt a planet?“. And I quote:

If you were to take the entire asteroid belt and form it into a single mass, it would only be about 4% of the mass of our Moon.

And then:

There’s a popular idea that perhaps there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter that exploded, or even collided with another planet. What if most of the debris was thrown out of the solar system, and the asteroid belt is what remains?

We know this isn’t the case for a few of reasons. First, any explosion or collision wouldn’t be powerful enough to throw material out of the Solar System. So if it were a former planet we’d actually see more debris.

Second, if all the asteroid belt bits came from a single planetary body, they would all be chemically similar. The chemical composition of Earth, Mars, Venus, etc are all unique because they formed in different regions of the solar system. Likewise, different asteroids have different chemical compositions, which means they must have formed in different regions of the asteroid belt.

So there you have it. Hubbard’s assertion that the asteroid belt is a “broken-up planet” is BS. So does this put the rest of that lecture into question?