Battleangel

The Church of Scientology has been busy lately. And they sure do get weirder with time. Apparently they have been marking a remote area of the New Mexico desert to make a, I don’t know, spiritual focal point, a giant business card … or … something. Considering the time lag of satellite imagery, this can’t be news exactly, but I had never heard of it before and the CoS seems secretive about it.

WAPO - 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.

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.

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.

Of course this is not visible from space. Not by a long shot. Unless GIS vision is one of the augmentations you earn in this fruitcake sect.

Like any religion or cult, they need legitimacy and mythos. And what serves that purpose better in American than celebrities and tacky tourist attractions. As such this is not so amusing and can be seen as a dangerous cult trying to manufacture its own relevance. Again, not so unlike religions in general, just more compressed in time and easier to perceive and indeed expose. And true to form they also enlisted its usual motley crue of legal experts to try and discourage KRQE from relaying the information.

Anyhow, the crop circles can of course be found on Google Maps as well as here.

In other Scientology news, South Park featured the infamous cult in episode #9.12 “Trapped in the Closet” a week ago.