Earlier this year, I posted some photographs that were sent to me by a reader. The images, taken inside a Scientology compound, showed small metal disks that had been encoded with sound recordings outlining the history and teachings of Scientology. The disks, we were told by our anonymous informant, were meant to carry the message of Scientology through nuclear war, through the end of human civilization, and well into whatever’s waiting on the other side… Well, it seems as though the place where these disks are stored has now been discovered. Here’s a clip from the Washington Post:

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…

“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.”

That’s right, it looks as though our friends in the Church of Scientology are keeping the disks hidden deep within a secret mountain fortress, and, what’s more, they’ve marked the location so that it’s visible from space…. Here’s more from the article:

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.

I know you’re probably expecting me to poke fun, but, truth be told, this is exactly what I’d do with my archives if I had the resources to do so. EXACTLY…. It’s naive to think that our culture, as it exists now, will make it too much farther into the future, and, in my opinion, any group with the resources to do so that isn’t looking into preserving their message, as silly as that message may be, is being negligent.

In my opinion, if your organization isn’t creating monoliths of some type to ensure the existence of your message (at least in an academic sense) in the future, and doing whatever it can to increase the likelihood that these relics might be discovered and understood by future races, you don’t deserve to exist. Scientologists, at least on this count, in my estimation, are 100% in the right. And, who knows, in the end they might end up at the front of the pack in the “spiritual marketplace” that is Earth. (”Wide-open spiritual marketplace” is a term that I heard used recently on conservative talk radio to describe China. Basically, they were saying that a billion souls were up for grabs and that every church in existence was trying to make inroads… I like the idea of souls as currency.)

As much as it pains me to say it, if I were the Pope, or anyone else running a large spiritual corporation, I’d be launching satellites right and left and buying up abandoned missile silos by the dozen to house copies of the Bible etched in titanium… Personally, I think it would probably be a bad thing for the universe if we entered into a spiritual arms race like the one I’m suggesting, but I think, at least from the perspective of those most invested, it should be part of any religion’s long-term strategy.

[Links to these images can be found at the Boing Boing site.]