Aerial Symbols
An aerial photograph showing the base's enormous Scientology symbols on the ground caused media interest and broke the story in November 2005. According to a Washington Post report, the Church's first reaction was to attempt to suppress the information:
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. ... 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.
The huge symbols on the base, distinguishable only from an aerial view ( 35°31'28.56"N 104°34'20.20"W), are specifically those of Scientology's Church of Spiritual Technology. Former members of the Church have said that the symbol marks a "return point" for Scientologists to help find Hubbard's works when they travel here in the future from other places in the universe.
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Read more about this topic: Trementina Base
Famous quotes containing the words aerial and/or symbols:
“Every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)