Revelations at Giant Rock
In 1950, a man named Samuel Eaton Thompson met Venusians, who explained to him that Earth’s troubles exist because people are born under different astrological signs—making them inherently incompatible. George Van Tassel had another idea. A onetime flight engineer with Lockheed, Van Tassel had become preoccupied with religious existentialism before World War II. He thought often of the mystery of mankind’s origins, and finally decided to clear his head by radically changing his way of life. In 1947, Van Tassel uprooted himself, his wife Eva, and three daughters, and moved to a spot in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California—and not just any spot, either. Van Tassel was attracted by the world’s largest freestanding boulder, a 5,800-square-foot, 100,000-ton behemoth called Giant Rock. Long before white men entered the area, the Rock was considered a holy place by Hopi shamans. Charlie Reche, a homesteader who came to Homestead Valley (later Landers) in the 1880s, was tolerated by the Hopi, and learned a great deal about Giant Rock’s spiritual properties. Reche’s knowledge slowly spread to the area’s other settlers.
Van Tassel became aware of Giant Rock as a young man, around 1930, when he was alerted to the site by a middle-aged, German-born prospector named Frank Critzer. When Critzer allowed Van Tassel to travel to the Rock with him, Van Tassel discovered that the prospector was living beneath the boulder, in a four-hundred-square-foot space hollowed from the Rock’s base. Critzer eventually drifted out of Van Tassel’s life (and was killed at Giant Rock during World War II, by local police that thought he was a German spy).
In 1952, Van Tassel founded Ashtar Command, a UFO movement based on channeled religious messages sent to receptive Earthlings. Van Tassel believed in the Rock’s spiritual quality, and surmised that at least some of that came from the boulder’s unique electromagnetic wave forms. Those waves, Van Tassel was convinced, had attracted the attention of extraterrestrials that periodically visited Earth in vast spaceships.
Van Tassel lived with his family in tents pitched near the Rock. He gave August 1953 as the date of his first contact with an alien, a male called Solganda. This alien and his companions (who greeted Van Tassel inside their ship) were non-threatening, and gave Van Tassel the information he needed to begin construction in 1957 on a “cell rejuvenating” electromagnetic device Van Tassel identified as an Integratron. The device also was a time machine capable, Van Tassel said, of sending a user back in time “to take a photograph of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address.” Van Tassel described Solganda, companions called Ashtar and Knut, and other aliens as “white people, with a healthy tan.”
They were, Van Tassel said, about five and half feet tall, “and if they walked down the street, you wouldn’t look twice at them.” One of the visitors allowed that he was more than seven hundred years old, “in Earth years.” Van Tassel already was interested in channeling as a way to travel beyond one’s body; the Integratron promised a more visible exit, to a secure place— whether interplanetary or interdimensional was never clear—where people selected by Van Tassel would find peace, wisdom, and contentment. They would be free from worry, free from harm.
Van Tassel’s status as an arbiter determining who would be saved gave his activities a cultlike aspect. Because his personal manner was unassuming, he attracted many people interested primarily in UFOs and alien visitors, rather than otherworldly salvation. In the spring of 1954, Van Tassel organized a UFO convention that attracted scores of people to Giant Rock. Frank Critzer had created a simple airstrip in the 1940s; Van Tassel enlarged it, and for more than twenty years, Van Tassel’s saucer conventions attracted buffs that flew their own planes to the site. (Van Tassel claimed to make his living from the “airport” [his word], but the strip was literally in the middle of nowhere.) A second gathering in 1955 attracted many more people than the first, and by the end of the decade, each Giant Rock convention drew upwards of ten thousand people. Many were simply curious; others had contactee stories of their own. The nuts and bolts of saucer flight attracted saucer buffs, while Van Tassel’s ability to channel aliens excited people eager to learn the wisdom of the stars.
During the middle and late 1950s, when contactee accounts were relatively novel, Van Tassel’s desert conventions attracted George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Orfeo Angelucci, and other contactees with exciting stories to relate and books, pamphlets, and photographs to sell. Variety columnist and saucer journalist Frank Scully was a special guest at the first convention in 1954.
Before long, Van Tassel and wife Eva opened a forty-seat restaurant, the Come On Inn, to service hungry and dehydrated conventioneers. The annual event welcomed vendors, who came with simple display tables and homemade signs to hawk pamphlets, photographs, “Flying Saucer Shirts,” cold drinks, and snacks.
Giant Rock, the desert, and the Rock’s Native American pedigree sparked people’s imaginations, and offered the lure of a trip more pleasing than a journey to, say, a saucer convention in a hotel ballroom in Oklahoma City. And then there was Van Tassel himself, a square-faced man with regular features, a husky build, and a calm, authoritative voice. If Van Tassel were an actor, Central Casting would have had him play influential businessmen, resolute military officers, or the Secretary of State. He was, in short, an appealing and commanding presence. He channeled for the crowds, occasionally remonstrating the alien presence to insist that more concentration be brought to bear on the communication channel.
When Van Tassel channeled at Giant Rock, he tethered himself to an audio system that altered his voice whenever one of his contacts spoke through him.
The channeled messages ran along familiar lines: the importance of brotherly love, and the incipient danger of atomic weapons. A July 18, 1952, channeled message originating with the alien called Ashtar warned that ongoing human research into the hydrogen bomb could only have a bad outcome, not least because hydrogen was one of the key elements of life. Scientists, Ashtar/Van Tassel said, “are tinkering with a formula they do not understand. They are destroying a life-giving element of the Creative Intelligence.” Later in that same July 18 channeling event, Ashtar said, “Your materialism will disagree with our attempt to warn mankind. Rest assured, they shall cease to explode life-giving atoms, or we shall eliminate all projects connected with such.
Our missions are peaceful, but this condition occurred before in this solar system, and the planet, Lucifer, was torn to bits. We are determined that it shall not happen again.” Science-and space-focused UFOlogists probably began edging toward the door when they heard the invocation of Lucifer, but Van Tassel persuaded enough people so that he had the means—through monetary contributions from believers —to establish the College of Universal Wisdom, and begin work on construction of his Integratron. The college published a house organ, Proceedings, which became useful when Van Tassel wanted to plug his fifty-six-page book I Rode in a Flying Saucer (1952) and later publications.
At the beginning of 1978, Proceedings reported that Van Tassel had nearly completed construction of the fiberglass and metal Integratron—by this time thirty-five feet high and fifty-five feet in diameter—which resembled a Buckminster Fuller dome. Van Tassel announced that he would be the first to step inside the device. But on February 9, 1978, Van Tassel died of natural causes. He was sixty-eight.
Without Van Tassel’s steady presence, the purpose of the Integratron became obscure. Within a few years, the site’s outbuildings had been razed by local authorities. In the end, only the Integratron dome remained. In the first decade of this century, promoters organized Retro UFO conventions at Giant Rock. Guests lectured about saucers, astrology, and government conspiracies of secrecy. One enthusiast showed up with a silvered face and mirrored sunglasses. Another wore a gas mask and shin guards. Other attendees wore more traditional costumes; “space girl” outfits were particularly popular. The conventions’ centerpiece was Van Tassel’s enormous Integratron dome. Although bereft of scientific equipment needed to make Van Tassel’s ambition a reality, the structure, particularly the vaulted, wooden inner dome, is beautiful and impressive. It remains a reasonably popular tourist attraction.
And what of Giant Rock itself? Early in the morning of February 21, 2000, the great boulder spontaneously shed a section of its circumference, revealing an inner rock face as white and pristine as the inside of a coconut.