George Van Tassel, Solganda and the Integratron (Giant Rock, 1953)

Giant Rock rises seven stories out of the Mojave Desert near Landers, California. In 1942 a prospector named Frank Critzer, suspected of being a German spy, died there when he set off dynamite during a police siege.

George Van Tassel, a former aircraft mechanic and flight inspector for Douglas, Hughes and Lockheed, took over the abandoned airstrip beside the rock. He lived in rooms dug beneath it and held meditation meetings. On January 6, 1952, he said, a telepathic message arrived from "Lutbunn, senior in command first wave, planet patrol." Others followed. One promised: "We are going to give this globe a buzz..."

August 24, 1953. About 2 a.m. Van Tassel was asleep outdoors near the rock. A man woke him. He introduced himself as Solganda, a member of the "Council of the Seven Lights." He came from Venus.

A scout ship had come to the landing strip, "about thirty-six feet in diameter and about nineteen feet high." Van Tassel stood on "a glowing spot on the sand" beneath it and was lifted through a hatch in the bottom. Inside, Solganda and three other men showed him "celestial navigational instrumentation" and "retractable seating." Light with no visible source lit everything evenly. The beings looked like "white people with a good healthy tan." They seemed young, yet claimed to be about 700 years old. Solganda answered questions Van Tassel had only thought.

About twenty minutes passed. Solganda gave him a technique for rejuvenating the human body. When Van Tassel mentioned stomach discomfort, Solganda tapped a crystalline device around his neck and vanished. The craft "rose into the air and took off in a northerly direction."

Van Tassel set out to build what he had been taught. Between 1954 and 1959 he raised the Integratron, about three miles from the rock. It is a 16-sided wooden dome, 38 feet high and 55 feet across, built without nails. He called it "a high-voltage electrostatic generator that would supply a broad range of frequencies to recharge the cell structure." On television in 1964 he reduced the formula to a single line. "There's nothing to it: F=1/T."

Meanwhile his Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions drew George Adamski and other contactees, with about 10,000 visitors at the 1959 peak. Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book, attended in 1955.

The FBI opened a file on Van Tassel in 1954 after a neighbour's reports and kept watch on him into the 1960s. The file records surveillance, not a verdict on the contact. There are no photographs, no radar and no other witnesses to that night.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid found that static electricity, negative ions and magnetism produce none of the claimed effects. He suggested mental illness was a likelier explanation than contact. Art Kunkin, founder of the LA Free Press, called Van Tassel "kind of nutty."

February 9, 1978. Van Tassel died of a heart attack in a hotel room before a TV interview, with the machine about 90% complete. His widow Dorris said his body "was cremated before anybody was notified," and the house was ransacked during the funeral. Some believers came to suspect he had been silenced. Today the Integratron is on the National Register of Historic Places, and 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a year come for its sound baths.