Just when everyone on alt.religion.scientology was talking about NOTs, it suddenly appeared from out of nowhere. On May 5, 1996, someone posted the entire contents of the NOTs pack to alt.religion.scientology through the Hacktic anonymous remailer. This person used the handle "Vorlon," and no one knows where this person was posting from. ("Vorlon" is the name of an alien race in the science fiction TV series Babylon 5.) For the first time, NOTs was freely available on the Internet. Two days later, NOTs was reposted again by "Vorlon," this time in HTML format so that it could easily be put up on a Web page. (No one took him up on his offer, however.) And immediately after that, NOTs was reposted yet a third time, though this time it came through the Super Zippo News service and not through an anonymous remailer. Scientology immediately contacted the Zippo service and demanded the identity of the poster from them. It is believed that despite these efforts, they were unable to determine who posted NOTs.
One week later, the Hacktic remailer shut down for good. The operator of the remailer cited repeated abuses of his system as the reason for closing it. As far as is known on alt.religion.scientology, the Church of Scientology did not directly pressure the remailer operator, nor did they explicitly request the identity of "Vorlon" from him.
In spite of Scientology's efforts to prevent NOTs from spreading, copies of the documents continued to float around on various servers for weeks afterward. Dave Touretzky posted a message saying that NOTs was available at Carnegie-Mellon University, and this resulted in a flurry of angry phone calls and faxes to the university's system administrators from Helena Kobrin. Another rumour circulated that copies of NOTs would be distributed at Worldcon (the largest science fiction convention in America), though no one has been able to confirm if this actually happened.
However, after their initial appearance, the NOTs documents became scarcer and harder to track down. Because they had been placed on the Internet through a genuine violation of copyright laws, people were far less willing to distribute them and display them than they were with the OT documents. By the time August of 1996 arrived, it seemed as though the existence of NOTs was little more than a rumour. The people who did have copies were keeping them secret, and no one was willing to risk the wrath of Scientology by re-posting it. But in August, NOTs suddenly exploded into the limelight.
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