Biography
Since 2005, Blair Watson has informed millions of people about important and fascinating aspects of aviation, the military, and homeland security through his news reports and magazine articles. His insightful journalism has been published by information providers in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including MSNBC, FOX News, and Yahoo! News. Before working as a journalist/professional writer, Blair was employed in airport operations, air traffic control training, and commercial flying.
Concerning his background in Mormonism, in 1966, when Blair was a toddler, his mother joined the Latter-day Saint (LDS/Mormon) Church and subsequently raised him (and his two sisters) in the religion. As is expected of young Mormon males at age nineteen, he trained to proselytize full-time for the church for several months and was deployed in early 1984 to impoverished and terrorism-afflicted Peru. There, he was sent to live in shantytowns and ghettos and work as an unpaid missionary among some of the country’s poorest people, where he witnessed the rich religious organization that he represented not use its very significant resources to alleviate their hardships.
Perversely, Blair, like thousands of other Mormonism-“programmed” missionaries around the world, had been instructed to indoctrinate converts to give at least one-tenth of their earnings, no matter how meager, to the church, which had billions of dollars in assets and annual income. “Tithes and offerings”, as they are known in the LDS Church, are among the many troubling aspects of Mormonism covered in Blair’s debut book, The Latter-Day Saint Swindle: The Mormon Church’s $200-Billion Scam.
Seven years after departing the troubled Latin American country, in 1992 Blair came across a book with a title that piqued his curiosity: The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit, & Death. The volume was written by two Harvard-trained lawyers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, and contained several disturbing facts about Mormonism, its founder (Joseph Smith, Jr.), the LDS Church, and its General Authorities (senior leaders) that were never revealed to Blair, his mother or sisters, his Mormon friends or missionary colleagues, or other Latter-day Saints. Why the secrecy? To bolster everyone’s “faith” in Mormonism and support – financially and in other ways – the ever-richer Utah-based organization.
As Blair read The Mormon Murders, he realized that the Mormonism was a scam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormon Church – had been guilty of fraud since its first decade of operations in the 1830s. He terminated his church membership and began creating a new and balanced life for himself, one free from LDS-created fear, guilt, and shame. Blair wrote in The Latter-Day Saint Swindle: The Mormon Church’s $200-Billion Scam that “it was a difficult, multi-year personal growth project that was psychologically liberating, intellectually intriguing, and supremely worthwhile.”
Starting in late 1996, Blair became involved in the grassroots Recovery from Mormonism movement, which has helped hundreds of thousands of people liberate themselves from the unethical Latter-day Saint Church and psychologically manipulative Mormon religion. He spent countless hours helping other former Mormons find the freedom he finally enjoyed.