Google Earth, upscaled by author
Trementina Base is one of those obscure places on Earth people don’t believe me when I tell them about it. “Scientology’s nuclear bunker where they store L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings etched onto circular stainless steel plates” sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel.
From the air, it looks like a pair of robot titties. In fact, mowing logos identifiable only from the air into terrain is a common practice, many corporations mark their land this way. But in this case, it’s purportedly so that the returning thetan (spirit) of L. Ron Hubbard can find his way back to this site, whereupon he will resume leadership of his church.
If that were the whole story of Trementina Base, it’d be interesting enough. Whatever else one might say about it, the Church of Scientology has never dealt in the mundane. This is, after all, the church which brought us the Marcab Confederacy and other brain melting alien lore.
Tony Ortega, upscaled by author
Trementina Base is located near Trementina, New Mexico at coordinates 355 27'46.48″ N, -1045 57'07.96″ W. A number of structures are present on the property, such as the LRH House, pictured above. The bunker itself isn’t under the robot titties logo as one might expect, but at the acute V-shaped point in the path between the logo and one of the other properties.
Notably, the land all this is built on wasn’t all sold at once. The first portion sold in 1976 isn’t where the vault was built. That was added to the second parcel, purchased in 1986. The timeline of these purchases and cost of the improvements made to the land became the subject of a lawsuit in 1992, but that’s not the focus of this article.
Google Earth, edits by Tony Ortega, upscaled by author
As you can see, besides LRH House and a few other structures on the main property, there’s a runway. Not intended for aircraft principally, but spacecraft. If you recall the story of Xenu revealed to Operating Thetan level 3 members and higher, alien spacecraft in some cases closely resemble DC-8 passenger jets.
There’s not much to write home about when it comes to the other structures present on the main 1976 property. More buildings for church related activities, a few trailers which are possibly housing for construction workers (the land’s ostensibly still under development, new buildings were being added as recently as 2015).
What you clicked for is the contents of the bunker/vault, on the parcel sold in 1986. Scientologists believe, arguably with good reason, that a nuclear war is inevitable. It seemed even more inevitable in the 70s when the main property was first purchased by the church, and in the 80s when the vault was added to the second parcel.
Wikipedia Commons, upscaled by author
The USSR didn’t collapse until 1991, so for most of the developmental history of Trementina Base, the cold war was ongoing. But with China emerging as a major world power, given Xi Jinping’s apparent temperament and the world’s reaction to Covid, fear of a nuclear war remains as defensible today as it was back then.
Anyway, within the vault is reportedly a set of 1.8 million(!) stainless steel discs into which the principle teachings of the Church of Scientology have been engraved, as well as 187,000 nickel records. These permanent backups of L Ron Hubbard’s teachings, or “tech”, cost the church 13 million USD to have fabricated for them.
What’s more, Trementina Base isn’t the only site of this kind. Sister sites dedicated to the same purpose of protecting permanent backups of Scientological materials exist in Petrolia, California at coordinates 40°23'15.55"N 124°18'19.05"W, and Creston, California at coordinates 35°27'12.29"N 120°29'59.20"W. Creston being notable as it’s where L. Ron died.
Tony Ortega, upscaled by author
Besides those sites, a new vault is currently under construction 2.3 miles northeast of Graniteville, CA. The subterranean compound will be accompanied by a “Cadet Org” on the surface, presumably some sort of training center for new recruits.
I don’t know about you, but it’s sobering to imagine that thousands of years after a cataclysmic global nuclear war, the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard may be the only surviving artefacts of human civilization that alien archaeologists are able to recover. What sort of picture would that paint for them?
Without any surviving contemporaneous accounts of L. Ron written by outsiders to compare the contents of those steel and nickel discs to, our hypothetical alien archaeologists would likely get a very different impression of what L. Ron was like then you or I have today.
We don’t have many surviving contemporaneous accounts of what Jesus was like that were written by outsiders, either. Most people today, even non-Christians, simply trust that the New Testament depicts him accurately. Food for thought.