Mesa Herfanita: Scientology’s bizarre lair in New Mexico
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An isolated underground bunker in the mountains of New Mexico absolutely screams of a James Bond villain. You could easily imagine some despot bad guy plotting world destruction from beneath the slopes.
This all starts at Mesa Herfanita in San Miguel County in northeastern New Mexico, USA. The name itself comes from two Spanish words. Mesa means plateau, which links with the area given the flat surface on the mountain, and herfanita means orphan, which was often used to name remote and desolate areas.
Myth and rumour surround the hills and what’s hidden underneath. Is this some Breaking Bad-style meth lab, does it have links to the area’s supposed UFO activity, to is it something more sinister? We don’t know with any degree of certainty. What is known is that it’s owned by an entity affiliated with the Church of Scientology, but for what, that isn’t exactly clear.
There are a number of theories around Mesa Herfanita, from a “space alien cathedral” to a slightly more realistic proposal that it could be a nuclear bunker designed to protect the church’s senior figures in the event of World War III.
Otherwise known as the Trementina Base, it’s been known about for around 20 years, although there are still a lot of question marks around this mysterious Church of Scientology property, which sits around 200 miles to the north of Roswell, the mecca for UFO-hunting.
What is known for certain is that this place is massive. It has two runways for aircraft, as well as a pair of symbols carved onto the mountain next to Mesa Herfanita, which are each the size of three football pitches.
Owned by the Church of Spirit Technology, it’s believed that they started investing in the area in the mid-1980s at the height of the Cold War. The CST are linked with the Church of Scientology, and is purported to be focused on preserving the teachings of L Ron Hubbard, the founder of the religion. The region has primarily been used for ranching throughout its recent history, with Spanish American settlers among those who resided in the area. The land was split between ranches and public lands, with few homesteads and no big towns or cities nearby.
Then the CST moved in, making purchases in the area, with the first of which being made in 1986, and continuing into the next decade. It’s believed that the total size of the land equates to around 400 acres, which is roughly the size of 200 football pitches, so imagine Hackney Marshes on steroids.
There’s a huge vault carved into the rock face, but what’s actually in there? It appears this could be a little more boring than we’d all hoped. A spokesperson for the group has revealed that it’s an archival storage unit for the writing and lectures of Hubbard, and is comparable to the Vatican archives. As for those giant symbols carved into the rock, they are apparently not to guide the church elites to the area after nuclear war, or to say hello to alien life forces, they’re just navigation devices to any pilots flying to the base.
We aren’t the first people to be interested in the site and what it holds. In the late 1980s, the FBI investigated the base due to a road being built across public land. When they looked into Mesa Herfanita, they found that while it had extensive digging and underground infrastructure, there was no criminal use behind it. The CST’s website backs up the archival claim, saying that there are over “135 tons of archival books, stainless-steel plates and nickel-plated records” all sorted in over 2,000 titanium capsules and “housed in calamity-proof vaults to ensure the timeless preservation and survival of the Scientology scripture”.
Sometimes the truth is far less interesting than conjecture, but when an organisation is as secretive as the Church of Scientology, it leads to speculation. With the mystery around the church, combined with a truly remote location and proximity to Roswell, it was always going to end up as a conspiracy theory.
Content retrieved from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/mesa-herfanita-scientology-lair-new-mexico/.
