CathrynRose
<font color=brown>R.I.P. Possibly Un-PC Tag, R.I.P
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2005
- Messages
- 20,077
Alright - this is long, but WTH??!!!?!?! (pics and original story at : http://www.anti-scientologie.ch/quiz.htm#Scientologists )
Scientologists try to stop KRQE report about compound
Source: KRQE News 13
ALBUQUERQUE -- KRQE News 13 has been working for months to bring you a story Monday night about a hidden Scientology compound in New Mexico. On Monday, the church worked just as hard to stop anyone from seeing that report.
The Church of Spiritual Technology flew their administrator to Albuquerque from Los Angeles. She visited the station with an attorney in an attempt to stop the story from airing.
The story is about a compound hidden deep in a remote part of New Mexico. Among other interesting features are markings in the landscape that can only be seen from the air and a vault built into a mountain side.
In the meantime, the Church of Spiritual Technology is doing all it can to stop this story from hitting the airwaves.
They and their attorney sat down with News 13 to try to convince us this story should stay private.
They also sought the help of a powerful New Mexican lawmaker, who called News 13 to say the scientologists had been "good neighbors" in San Miguel County, and encouraged the station not to air the story.
The church administrator says the organization has also called the president of KRQE-TVs parent corporation, Emmis Communications, to get him to put a halt to the story.
Transcription (This isn't a perfect transcript, but should be enough to inform readers of the gist of this news coverage).
KRQE Report on Trementina Scientology Vault
11-21-2005 (10PM)
Video available online at : http://www.krqe.com/video/expanded.asp?ID=3350
(Anchors) A very secret, well-guarded vault sits in the mountains of Northern New Mexico.
One that very few people know about.
It's a vault that is sacred to the Church of Scientology. So, what's in that vault, and why is it such a secret? News 13's Kim Vallez finds out.
(Reporter Vallez) John Travolta. Leah Remini. Kathryn Bell. Kirstie Alley. Jenna Elfman. These are reportedly the most famous faces of Scientology. Well, aside from Tom Cruise of course.
(Oprah Show Excerpt : Oprah asks Tom, "Have you ever felt this way before ?" as crowd screams, while Tom Cruise jumps on the couch)
Who could forget this jumping on the couch incident on Oprah ? Cruise, so in love with Katie Holmes, something he attributes to Scientology.
(Tom Cruise : "There's things in my life, Scientology and tools that I've spoken of before, that I apply to my life")
The first major religion to be created in the 20th Century. The man behind it, the author who brought the world Battlefield Earth and other sci-fi thrillers. L. Ron Hubbard taught his followers that man has lived through many past lives and is immortal. And to be happy, a person must deal with bad spirits and memories of past traumas. All those teachings are being preserved, and stashed, right here in New Mexico.
"This thing is built into the face of a rock."
Few people have been inside.
(Reporter Vallez) "The compound is very secluded and hidden. To get to it you have to drive nearly an hour out of Las Vegas, through miles and miles of barren pasture land. You then drive through some mountain areas, and then several miles of winding, dusty dirt road. At the end of the County Road sits 40 private acres. And visitors say, several miles beyond this, sits a massive, lavish compound. And this vault. It may look like a house, but if you look closely, you see the secret it conceals.
(Visual: House, 3 -story, sits against hillside, and graphic traces an exterior wall behind it, which is the face of the vault).
(Police Spokesman Gallegos) The actual vault area is built up into the side of the mountain.
Las Vegas (New Mexico) Police Chief Tim Gallegos, is one of very few non-Scientologists to go inside. He toured the vault 12 years ago.
(Gallegos) If I remember correctly, it was about 300 feet deep, at that time.
The things he saw, haven't faded from his memory.
(Gallegos) They have a CD. They're using some special paper that they're actually printing this on. It's got special ink and its supposed to last forever. They were titanium plates and some other things.
All this, Gallegos said, is used to preserve the teachings and writings of L. Ron Hubbard. The paper, similar to that used for money. And, the titanium plates, they were actually inscribed and etched
(Gallegos) yes, like etched. Exactly. And they had a process of doing it.
The boxes they are stored in -- also Titanium.
(Gallegos) They were a little bit larger than, maybe, a case of paper. A box of paper. And all of these things were put in there. And they had special screws and a special way of actually sealing the box. They had these things lined up. I want to say, they are probably four or five feet tall, and I don't remember how many containers actually fit on three shelves of these mobile racks, that they were wheeling them in.
(Les Montoya) Very unique. It's very unique.
San Miguel County Manager Les Montoya has not been allowed in the vault, but has visited the compound twice. And he's learned the story behind it.
(Montoya) We asked the question, how, why was the facility located in San Miguel County and they said they went through a series of questions and concerns regarding the future of the Earth basically, and they're saying look, of maps throughout the world, this was one area that met all their requirements. And so they set up shop there.
One interesting thing that can't be seen from a ground tour, is this symbol (Visual : Double Interlocked Circles with Diamond Centers, the CST logo) within the trees, which Sky Ranger videotaped from the air. It's a symbol that can be seen all the way from space. We haven't been able to determine what the symbol means to believers, but we do know it's a registered trademark of the Church of Spiritual Technology -- A branch of Scientology which actually owns the New Mexico property. (Visual : Satellite Photo of CST Creston property). This very same symbol shows up on a property in California.
Did you know that this compound even existed here ?
(Interviewee) No.
If you ask around in Las Vegas (New Mexico), very few people even know of this secret vault. When they find out.
(Interviewee) Wow ...
Did you know this existed ?
(Interviewee) No I did not. Now I do.
Those who do know, have their own theories.
My opinion right now is that it is individuals that have a strong belief in what Mr. Hubbard pressed on, and they're willing to put a lot of energy and effort and resources into preserving what his belief was.
(Gallegos) Being a police officer, of course, right away you're suspicious. Because, the first question is, why are they here, why are they spending so much money here and what are they doing. But, with that being said, I didn't see anything that would lead me to believe, that they were doing anything but what they said they were doing.
Most people do agree, this small hidden New Mexico town, seems an unlikely place for a Science Fiction like religion of the future.
(Gallegos) I would say it's like putting this country guy in the middle of a fancy dinner in California someplace.
We were denied permission to visit the vault when we put our story together. However, Church representatives offered us today a chance to go inside, if we agreed to cancel tonight's story. We declined.
(Anchor) Thank you Kim. And we want to apologize for that interruption at the top of Kim's story. The cable broadcasting network for some reason chose that exact moment to do a systemwide emergency broadcast. What you missed is some of the faces, the famous faces attached to Scientology, John Travolta, Leah Remini. Kirstie Alley. Jenna Elfman. And Tom Cruise, of course.
We're told there are about 200 to 250 Scientologists living here in New Mexico. Most of them are not affiliated with the remote mountain compound, but rather with the Church, here in Albuquerque.
Visual : Poll results
Today's KRQE question asked,
if you consider Scientology a religion.
7% of those voting said yes,
90% said no,
and 3% aren't sure
(end)
(This isn't a perfect transcript, but should be enough to inform readers of the gist of this news coverage).
Watch the Report
A Place in the Desert for New Mexico's Most Exclusive Circles
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Secret Flying Saucer Base Found in New Mexico ?
Maybe. From the state that gave us Roswell, the epicenter of UFO lore since 1947, comes a report from an Albuquerque TV station about its discovery of strange landscape markings in the remote desert. They're etched in New Mexico's barren northern reaches, resemble crop circles and are recognizable only from a high altitude.
Also, they are directly connected to the Church of Scientology.
(Cue theremin music.)
The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault "built into a mountainside," the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.
The archiving project, which the church has acknowledged, includes engraving Hubbard's writings on stainless steel tablets and encasing them in titanium capsules. It is overseen by a Scientology corporation called the Church of Spiritual Technology. Based in Los Angeles, the corporation dispatched an official named Jane McNairn and an attorney to visit the TV station in an effort to squelch the story, KRQE news director Michelle Donaldson said.
The church offered a tour of the underground facility if KRQE would kill the piece, the station said in its newscast. Scientology also called KRQE's owner, Emmis Communications, and "sought the help of a powerful New Mexican lawmaker" to lobby against airing the piece, the station reported on its Web site.
McNairn did not respond to messages requesting comment; an employee said that McNairn was traveling last week, and that no one else from the church would be able to comment.
What do the markings mean? For starters, the interlocking circles and diamonds match the logo of the Church of Spiritual Technology, which had the vault constructed in a mesa in the late 1980s. The $2.5 million construction job was done by Denman and Associates of Santa Fe, but company Vice President Sally Butler said of the circles, "If there is anything like that out there, it had nothing to do with us."
Perhaps the signs are just a proud expression of the Scientology brand. But there are other, more intriguing theories.
Former Scientologists familiar with Hubbard's teachings on reincarnation say the symbol marks a "return point" so loyal staff members know where they can find the founder's works when they travel here in the future from other places in the universe.
"As a lifetime staff member, you sign a billion-year contract. It's not just symbolic," said Bruce Hines of Denver, who spent 30 years in Scientology but is now critical of it. "You know you are coming back and you will defend the movement no matter what. . . . The fact that they would etch this into the desert to be seen from space, it fits into the whole ideology."
Recall if you will that Scientology traces most of mankind's woes to an evil alien lord named Xenu, a galactic holocaust perpetrated 75 million years ago, and, uh, the field of psychiatry. (The latter is a particular concern, as all of America now knows, of movie star Tom Cruise.)
The church maintains two other vaults in California to preserve Hubbard's materials and words, according to Hines and another longtime staff member who also quit a couple of years ago, Chuck Beatty of Pittsburgh.
"The whole purpose of putting these teachings in the underground vaults was expressly so that in the event that everything gets wiped out somehow, someone would be willing to locate them and they would still be there," said Beatty, who spent 28 years in Scientology. Some loyalists are tasked specifically with the "super-duper confidential" job of coming back to Earth in the far-off future, he added.
The billion-year contracts are signed by members of what Hubbard, a Navy lieutenant in World War II, called the church's Sea Organization. The motto of that cadre, according to Beatty and Hines, who said they were both members, is "We come back."
The New Mexico site is about a 2 1/2 -hour drive east of Santa Fe, near the small town of Trementina. The contents of the vault itself are not secret -- they were shown in 1998 on ABC News's "20/20."
"Buried deep in these New Mexico hills in steel-lined tunnels, said to be able to survive a nuclear blast, is what Scientology considers the future of mankind," ABC's Tom Jarriel said in his report. "Seen here for the first time, thousands of metal records, stored in heat-resistant titanium boxes and playable on a solar-powered turntable, all containing the beliefs of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard."
Other religions preserve their sacred texts. Nothing strange there. Scientology leaders apparently just don't want to misplace theirs, and maybe this is why somebody put the giant circles on the scrubland. Because there's nothing worse than arriving from deep space, and not knowing where to park.
The Washington Post Company - 2005