Years before Giant Rock mysteriously split, this apartment-sized monolith achieved widespread notoriety. According to unsubstantiated internet accounts, the ancestral Serrano and Chemehuevi people conducted spiritual ceremonies at Giant Rock, during which only the chief was allowed to touch or be near it.[2] By the start of the Great Depression, an eccentric prospector would tunnel underneath it to build his home. The boulder’s next tenant would claim that a friendly extraterrestrial visitor had provided the design plans for the nearby domed time-travel machine known as the Integratron.
New Agers have described Giant Rock’s location as a spiritual vortex where the earth’s “ley lines” intersect, thus channeling mystical and psychic energy. Perhaps there is some validity to this assertion? After all, Landers, located about twenty miles north of Joshua Tree National Park, was the epicenter of a severely destructive 7.3 magnitude earthquake on June 28, 1992.
On February 19th and 20th, 2000, Shri Naath Devi, founder of South Central LA’s Eagle Wings of Enlightenment, began a “long dance” ceremony with a group of devotees after Shri had earlier divined that Giant Rock was suffering from spiritual neglect. In response, the earth would undergo a “violent upheaval” unless the group intervened. The story details how “Mother” would crack the boulder “at its side” if she answered their prayers. Alternatively, if the great boulder split through the middle, Mother was displeased with humankind.
After fasting, the group began the ceremony at Giant Rock and moved to the nearby Integratron property that afternoon. Here, from sunset to 3:30 a.m. the following morning, eight to ten participants danced around a fire until “the last person fell from exhaustion.” The rite concluded as a light rain began to fall.[3] Not only did the boulder crack the next day, but an enormous one-eighth section also broke off. Shri Naath Devi and her acolytes interpreted this event as Mother Earth “opening her arms to us, cracking open her heart for the world to see.”[4] This episode adds yet another cryptic layer to the strange and colorful folk history of Giant Rock, which some considered the largest freestanding boulder in the world.
Our story begins nearly ninety years ago when Frank M. Critzer first stumbled upon this exceptional boulder.[5] The itinerant Critzer was born in 1886 in Waynesboro, Virginia.[6] It is not known how Critzer, a former member of the Merchant Marine, first learned about Giant Rock, but he arrived there in 1931.[7] Critzer proceeded to set up camp as a squatter and then filed a mining claim shortly after that.[8] A self-reliant soul, Critzer began to blast out a 24 by 36 foot, two-room home underneath the immense boulder’s north side. The underground dwelling featured hand-hewn stone stairs leading to a ventilated living room, kitchen area and bedroom. A bank of windows positioned under the boulder’s overhang passively lit the chamber during the daytime, and a water catchment system collected occasional desert rainfall off the rock’s face. As a result, the interior of his underground home remained a temperate 55° to 80° Fahrenheit year-round.
Most accounts describe Critzer as an odd but pleasant host. He served up German pancakes while he and his visitors conversed, propping up their legs on boxes of dynamite, which their host used for his various prospecting and construction projects. Locally, Critzer was known for community service. He had graded thirty-three miles of roads in the future Landers area, becoming known as “Straight Road Frank” for his efforts. He also graded an emergency landing field on the dry lake east of the boulder, complete with an unauthorized windsock, which remained operational from 1940 to 1975. One of Critzer’s strangest boasts was how he was “so full of electricity” that he could charge flashlight batteries by simply placing them under his pillow while he slept.[9]
Publicly, Critzer had a likable character. An illustrated article from the May 9, 1937 edition of the Los Angeles Times featured his unique home and the public airstrip. A few years later, however, a Times article dated July 26, 1942, presented Critzer in a completely different light: three Riverside deputy sheriffs raided his subterranean home on July 25, 1942, seeking information on recent thefts of dynamite, gasoline and mining equipment in area towns.[10] Apparently, the sheriffs’ encounter with Critzer had gone sour.
To add fuel to the fire, Critzer had been under FBI investigation sometime during the late 1930s for suspicious activities spurred by pre-World War II paranoia and his fraudulently assumed German heritage. It hadn’t helped that he had installed a short-wave radio antenna and receiver on a nearby rock formation, adding to the speculation that he was a Nazi spy. Critzer was later cleared of these charges, but law enforcement and some locals remained apprehensive of this eccentric desert character.
“I’m going all right,” the hermit bellowed. “But you’re going with me!” And before the sheriff could interfere Kritzer [sic.] pressed the plunger of a detonator wired to his secret cache of dynamite and it went off with a terrific roar. –“How the Hermit of Giant Rock Sealed His Strange Secret,” The American Weekly, November 8, 1942
Several versions began to circulate regarding the actual chain of events that occurred on July 25, 1942. The Times states that shortly after arriving, deputies Claude McCraken, Harold Simpson and Fred Pratt experienced severe injuries when seventy pounds of Critzer’s dynamite mysteriously exploded. McCraken, being the first to enter the cave, was the most seriously injured of the three. The blast was so forceful that it shredded his clothing as he was violently thrown about the room. After sustaining up to 100 bloody gashes, McCraken was hospitalized. The explosion occurred as the other two deputies descended the stairs, allowing them to escape with concussions and less severe injuries. Varying accounts suggest that either Critzer or the deputies somehow accidentally or purposely set off the dynamite during the confrontation.
One thing is known: Critzer, 56, died immediately. Details are murky as to how or why the blast occurred since the explosion and subsequent fire destroyed any evidence that could determine Critzer’s guilt or innocence. As it turned out, the missing dynamite was later discovered in Joshua Tree National Monument.[11]
Before Critzer’s questionable demise, George W. Van Tassel, an Ohio native who had moved to Southern California in 1930 at age twenty to work in the booming aviation industries, visited Critzer regularly. Van Tassel worked for Douglas Aircraft until 1941, then moved on to Howard Hughes’ operation and finally ended his aviation career at Lockheed’s Skunk Works in Burbank. Van Tassel claims to have worked as a flight safety inspector and even as Howard Hughes’ test pilot, although some researchers assert that he most likely embellished his career history.12 Van Tassel additionally claimed that he had first met Critzer in 1930 at his uncle Glenn Paine’s Santa Monica auto repair shop, just before the aspiring prospector made his way out to the Morongo Basin.
According to Van Tassel’s story, Critzer had found himself broke and in desperate need of car repairs when he stumbled into Paine’s shop. The three struck up an immediate friendship to the extent that Paine and Van Tassel repaired Critzer’s car for free and let him bunk in the garage overnight. By the next day, Paine and Van Tassel had “grubstaked” Critzer $30 plus foodstuffs so that he could prospect in the desert. Critzer planned to repay them once he struck it rich. Remember that $30 was a hefty sum in 1930—around $430 in today’s dollars—a rather generous sum of cash to hand over to a stranger. The trio agreed that he would drop them a line notifying them of his general whereabouts. Critzer kept his word. Van Tassel maintained that he regularly visited Critzer’s desert home beginning in 1931, occasionally with his family in tow. During these excursions, Critzer shared his innovative inventions with Van Tassel, including breakthrough formulas for plastics not currently in use. But all was lost in the explosion.
Even after Critzer’s untimely death, Van Tassel continued to visit Giant Rock. Drawn to the high desert, he eventually applied for a Bureau of Land Management permit to operate the airport on 2,600 acres of public land in 1945. In 1947, George, his wife Eva, and their three daughters moved to Giant Rock, where they began their new life running the airport and a café called Come On Inn. Eva’s tasty hamburgers and spiced apple pies were popular with the locals.
During the early 1950s, Van Tassel began hosting Friday night “meditation” sessions in Critzer’s former subterranean digs. During these channeling meet-ups, Van Tassel claimed to have received telepathic communications, which he referred to as “thought transference,” originating from a group of benevolent Venusian extraterrestrials. The first of these psychic transmissions began on January 6, 1952, when “Lutbunn, senior in command first wave, planet patrol, realms of Schare” initially contacted him.[13] These psychic visitations became so numerous that by the end of 1952, Van Tassel had enough to publish a collection of missives titled I Rode a Flying Saucer. His volume included salutatory telepathic messages from bizarrely named compassionate aliens, such as Ashtar, Clatu, Locktopar, Singba and Totalmon.
In his 1956 book Into This World and Out Again, Van Tassel recounted his first physical encounter with the beings. He was awakened by Solgonda, a member of the Council of the Seven Lights, around 2 a.m. on August 24, 1953, and taken onto a spacecraft that had landed at Giant Rock’s adjacent airstrip.[14] Van Tassel described the spaceship as “about thirty-six feet in diameter and about nineteen feet high,” with an interior space that appeared somewhat smaller. Once Van Tassel teleported aboard, Solganda and three other male humanoids showed him the craft’s celestial navigational instrumentation and other features, including retractable seating—shared to Van Tassel via telepathy. The entire incident was estimated to have lasted about twenty minutes. During a 1964 televised interview, Van Tassel described the extraterrestrials as youthful “white people with a good healthy tan,” and of average human height. He estimated their ages at 700 years old.
Many of the telepathic missives warned Van Tassel and his fellow humans about the dangers of testing atomic and thermonuclear armaments. For instance, on April 19, 1952, Kerrull, 64th projection, 2nd wave, 4th sector patrol, realms of Schare proclaims, “due to inaccurate calculations, many of your fellow beings will suffer prolonged illness from an experiment to be conducted next week. This folly in the use of atomic power for destruction will rebound upon the users. Discontinue.” Indeed, the U.S. Government detonated eight “free airdrop” atomic weapons between April 1 and June 5, 1952, at the Nevada Proving Ground as part of Operation Tumbler-Snapper, which caused “dramatically higher civilian radiation exposures” of radioiodine 131 in downwind regions.[15]
As a UFO “contactee,” Van Tassel was not unique. It is not coincidental that nearly all of these individuals hailed from Southern California. Or that many experienced alien encounters in the California Desert. Consider George Adamski, author of the 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie). Adamski stated that his first encounter with a friendly Venusian called “Orthon” near Desert Center, California, on November 20, 1952, occurred around the same time as Van Tassel’s initial contact.[16]
Adamski described Orthon as a fashionably attired extraterrestrial sporting a belted jumpsuit, with tanned Nordic features and shoulder-length blond hair who communicated telepathically. In 1949, several years before this particular encounter, Adamski began giving public lectures throughout Southern California about his numerous UFO sightings in the Palomar Gardens area of north San Diego County. As with Van Tassel’s compassionate aliens, Orthon forewarned Adamski about the perils of atomic testing, with the explanation that radiation emanating from earth would spread and contaminate the entire solar system.
Adamski also claimed that the Venusians subscribed to universal law, stressing a “Creator of All” that conveniently reflected Judeo-Christian religious beliefs and doctrines. The idea that Christianity and even Christ himself came from outer space seems to be the prevailing ethos communicated by these alien mentors to their 1950s contactees.
Van Tassel went so far as to postulate that Mary, mother of Christ, was herself an extraterrestrial “who volunteered through assignment” to birth Jesus on Earth, or Shan, as the space people were said to call our planet. It seems that Jesus Christ, too, was an alien selected for duty. Both were part of Van Tassel’s “Adamic Race” of “space people of God’s pure creation.”[17] He goes on to mention that the three wise men present at Christ’s birth were extraterrestrials who followed the spacecraft, better known as the Star of Bethlehem, “until it hovered where Jesus was being born.” The previous statement is an example of one of Van Tassel’s numerous and complicated revisionist interpretations of both the New and Old Testaments, in which he posits “angel” as a misspelling and misinterpretation of “alien,” or that a select group of individuals with the correct “vibratory body aura” will be snatched up to the heavens by godly extraterrestrials during the Rapture.[18]
In his 1976 collection of writings When Stars Look Down, he notes: “Whether one believes in Christ, or not, is not the point…The point is that the conditions of earth require outside intervention, and the time conforms to the requirements of prophecy.” Thus, Van Tassel and other 1950s “Christian ufologists” including Adamski and Orfeo Angelucci ushered in the 1970s “New Age of Earth” movement, mixing esoteric traditions, occultism, 1960s counterculture and environmentalism into an eclectic, holistic spiritual institution.
Another notable mid-century contactee with Mojave Desert connections was Truman Bethurum, a day laborer who moonlighted as a fortuneteller and spiritual advisor. Bethurum detailed his own experience in his 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, claiming how he had boarded a spacecraft that landed in the desert near a worksite where he and a construction crew were laying asphalt. The vessel captain turned out to be a petite, incredibly striking humanoid female named Aura Rhanes, visiting from the planet Clarion. Bethurum explained how humans could not directly view this unknown planet because it remained behind the sun, seemingly unfettered by the laws of planetary motion. During their ten recorded meetings, notably at public lunch counters, Aura communicated to Bethurum that Clarion was a utopian society free of “war, divorce and taxes.” In addition, she shared how Clarionites lived to be nearly 1,000 years old and were good Christians to boot. Captain Rhanes offered Bethurum a ride on her spacecraft, but she reneged. Bethurum claims he never saw or heard from her again, although he remained obsessed with the illusory Aura throughout his life, leading to the failure of his second marriage.
Bethurum relocated to Landers shortly after attending one of Van Tassel’s seventeen annual Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Conventions. The events attracted droves of the UFO-obsessed, who spent two days in the desert camping in tents and travel trailers. First, the core 1950s contactees, including Adamski, Angelucci, Bethurum and other guests, lectured to a festive and enthusiastic crowd from a wooden platform located at the southern side of Giant Rock. Then, as they waited patiently for extraterrestrial visitors in the evening, attendees gathered around campfires, swapping personal sightings of UFOs, alien abductions, and other unexplained phenomena.
Depending on the year and the source cited, the convention reportedly attracted 1,200 to 11,000 attendees during the mid-to-late-1950s. During the height of the UFO intrigue, Van Tassel announced his plans to run for president in 1960, using the convention as his campaign launch, confident that his alien friends would help him win. However, interest in the gatherings began to wane during the early 1970s because UFO sightings had become commonplace in Van Tassel’s view.
In conjunction with his annual convention, Van Tassel launched the non-profit, non-sectarian Ministry of Universal Wisdom in 1958 and an associated college dedicated to “religious and scientific research.” He also began publishing and distributing The Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom and authored several more books.19 In these sprawling treatises, Van Tassel jumps recklessly from one pseudo-scientific theory to another, suggesting that he was an intelligent, active thinker with far too much time on his hands. Sprinkled throughout his essays are references to esoteric philosophies, including Theosophy and Spiritualism, hints of Scientology, Mormonism, and his form of Christian revisionist ufology.
Over time, Van Tassel would boast that he appeared on 409 radio and television shows and had given 297 lectures. While listening and watching the few archived lectures of him available online, it is easy to comprehend why his many followers found his demeanor so convincing—Van Tassel’s reassuring voice and his fair, conservative Anglo appearance projected an effortless image of professionalism, sincerity and authority.
THE INTEGRATRON
A “TIME MACHINE”
FOR BASIC RESEARCH ON
REJUVENATION
ANTI-GRAVITY
TIME TRAVEL
In 1953, Van Tassel began to conceive, plan and construct the Integratron, located three miles south of Giant Rock on Linn Road in Landers, California. This sixteen-sided domed wooden structure is thirty-eight feet high and fifty-five feet in diameter, joined together without nails or metal fasteners to interfere with its conductive qualities. Painted brilliant white, the exterior from a distance gives the impression that a flying saucer has just landed. A central one-ton concrete core holds the structure’s curvilinear wooden skeleton in place. Copper wire emanating from the core spirals outward to enfold the entire circumference of the structure. The rotating “floating” armature, mounted with sixty-four aluminum collectors, was designed to act as a huge capacitor to collect “up to 50,000 volts of static electricity from the air to charge the human body,” but it never became operational.[21]
Los Angeles architect Howard Peyton Hess drafted the structural plans. Asked whether he had received his design directives from aliens in an interview. He replied:
No little space people stood at my elbow and whispered in my ear. But when I finished the job, Van Tassel told me, “They surely must have been guiding you on this. It’s exactly what we want.”
But Hess went on to mention that he heard “voices purporting to be those of space people giving messages through Van Tassel’s vocal cords.”[22] Over the twenty-five years that Van Tassel worked on the Integratron, over $200,000 in worldwide donations from his devotees funded its construction—one could imagine the endeavor as an early crowdfunding project.
Van Tassel long maintained that Solganda provided him with the formula for the Integratron during their purported exchange at Giant Rock in August 1953. Over time, Van Tassel would interchangeably assert that this formula was a seventeen-page equation tested secretly in Chicago or that Solganda had verbally stated this far simpler version: f=1/t with (f) for frequency and (t) for time.[23]
In truth, the Integratron’s design and ultimate function were distilled from numerous sources, arising from Van Tassel’s obsession with fringe science. Conceptually, the Integratron is an amalgam of arcane interests, including Mesmerism, also known as animal magnetism, which posits an invisible natural force, possibly a vital bodily fluid, possessed by all living animate beings that respond to magnetism. The word “mesmerize” originated from Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century founder of Mesmerism, which his peers discounted as pseudo-science.[24]
More central to the concept behind the Integratron is the work of Russian scientist Georges Lakhovsky, whose first iteration of his Multiple Wave Oscillator appeared in 1923. Lakhovsky authored The Secret of Life: Electricity, Radiation and Your Body in 1929, positing that, “cells from living organisms behave as tiny radio transmitters and receivers” sensitive to oscillations or frequencies that could be positively manipulated by his therapeutic electromagnetic device to cure cancer and other disorders.[25] This device, whose main components were two large copper coils infused with high voltage, in turn borrowed heavily from Nikola Tesla’s invention, the Tesla coil. Van Tassel extensively cites both Lakhovsky’s and Tesla’s concepts in his texts describing the inner workings of the Integratron. Coincidentally, Tesla publicly shared that he, too, had received extraterrestrial communiqués.
Like batteries, cells run down, bodies run down, and the energy loss is manifested as aging. —George Van Tassel, When Stars Look Down
George Van Tassel pictured with his Integratron in Landers, CA. Photo: Daniel Hennessy for LIFE Magazine 1962..
The Integratron website describes the structure as “a resonant tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex in the magical Mojave Desert.” Indeed, the Integratron was designed as an electrostatic generator to rejuvenate human cells and tissue. But its designation as a “time machine” has been misconstrued. Instead of literal time travel, Van Tassel envisioned the Integratron as a device that allows those who physically enter it to transcend the effects of time by defying the laws of gravity and reverse the ravages of age on the body—or so he claimed.
Once the structure was operational, Van Tassel intended for participants to don white suits, enter and pass through the lower floor in a precise 270-degree arc, during which each individual was exposed to the machine’s rejuvenating “electromagnetic vibrations” before exiting through the rear door. The revolution of an external ring located between the two floors of the structure generated the energy, which transferred and focused the “electrostatic forces” within the concrete-housed stator, positioned in the center of the lower floor. Thus, rather than sitting between the two copper coils of Lakhovsky’s design, Van Tassel’s participants were immersed in a giant copper generating spiral that encircled the entire building.
The structure was finished by 1959, but when Van Tassel mysteriously died of a heart attack on February 9, 1978, its electrostatic mechanism was only ninety percent complete. Because of this, the Integratron was considered nonfunctional. Yet, no one could locate plans or instructions to make it operational. Followers close to Van Tassel claimed that the blueprints were stolen and attributed the theft as a conspiratorial cover-up to prevent the machine from being used as planned. Fittingly, Van Tassel’s epitaph read “Birth through Induction, Death by Short Circuit.”
After Van Tassel’s death, his second wife, Dorris, leased the building to several tenants, including one who had plans to make the dome into a disco. Over the next few years, the structure began to fall into disrepair until a New Age couple from the Bay area, interested in preserving the Integratron’s unique history, decided to purchase it in 1987 for $50,000. The dome’s latest owners are three sisters from the east coast, Joanne, Nancy and Patty Karl, who bought the property in 2000. Over time, they have lovingly restored both the grounds and the building, which requires constant structural maintenance. In 2018, the National Registry of Historic Places nominated the Integratron for consideration.26
The Integratron has become an outrageously trendy tourist destination with 20,000 to 30,000 visitors each year. For a fee, immersive sound-bath sessions are performed with specialized white quartz bowls of varying sizes to produce transformative “harmonic sound frequencies” within the acoustically perfect upstairs space. A 2014 New York Times feature described the experience as similar to being “inside of a musical instrument.” Indeed, participating in a sound bath at the Integratron is to encounter sound both purely and physically. The spatial qualities of the structure generate audio tones and vibrations that aurally envelop your body and mind in a profoundly pleasant meditative state.
Whether or not one believes in Van Tassel’s alleged alien encounters or the Integratron’s extraterrestrial provenance, one must acknowledge his devoted affection for the landscape surrounding Giant Rock. Here, the Mojave Desert plays a starring role in Van Tassel’s out-of-this-world vision that was both a site for the wildly popular UFO conventions he hosted and his magnum opus, the Integratron.
One can surmise from Van Tassel’s writings and interviews that, as an embedded desert dweller who slept with his family semi-outdoors most evenings, he remained attuned throughout his life to the desert’s many nuances and hidden secrets.
The public’s fascination with Van Tassel’s UFO-tinged form of Christianity was not coincidental; his claims were uncannily similar to those of his peers. With its heavy dose of showmanship, fringe science and esoteric spiritual practices, Van Tassel’s oeuvre became the ideal remedy for the looming Cold War anxiety of the technological age. His ego-driven vision may have indirectly inspired darker manifestations of these UFO-based myths, such as the infamous 1997 Heaven’s Gate mass suicide.[27] Still, mid-twentieth-century popular culture would not be the same without Van Tassel’s moonstruck extraterrestrial-infused visions.
Shortly after Giant Rock cleaved in 2000, theories began to circulate on the cause of the split, including the previously mentioned “long dance” ceremony. The local Hi-Desert Star offered natural causes as the likely culprit, suggesting that an existing fracture in the rock had given way from continuous weather-induced expansion and contraction along with intermittent seismic events. A 4.4 earthquake centered in Loma Linda, California, had been recorded just two hours before the break.
One of the more rational explanations was the extreme heat generated by numerous bonfires set at all sides of the boulder throughout the years—some large and hot enough to do lasting damage. Indeed, Giant Rock continues to be a popular local meet-up spot for partying teenagers, ravers, campers and off-roaders, who have regularly set fires around the monolith using large timbers, tires, car engines and other combustible items. The resulting black soot lingers on the boulder’s lower northern face, where the Bureau of Land Management filled in Critzer’s bunker during the early 1980s. One gentleman wrote to the Hi-Desert Star, suggesting that the 1942 blast contributed to the split. Whatever the actual cause, most folks were not particularly surprised when crude graffiti appeared instantaneously, marring the pristine white surface.
On February 21, 2004, the Hi-Desert Star reported that a woman painted the exposed inner surface of Giant Rock a bright magenta using a generator-powered airless sprayer. Two dirt-bike riders stumbling upon this January 11, 2004 “artistic” intervention were aghast. When they asked the woman what she was doing, she explained, “This is my way of expressing the rock’s pain. The rock is bleeding from the split.” The woman has never been identified. The red paint is no longer visible. Layers of new tagging have replaced it. Lacking any reverence for what this boulder may have witnessed throughout its unfathomable history, these individuals return time and time to deface it without forethought.
Throughout the years, several local groups, including the Friends of Giant Rock, have organized cleanup efforts and graffiti abatement in their attempt to rid the area of trash, debris and unsightly markings on the boulder’s surface. Artist Karyl Newman, who created a detailed online interactive timeline of Giant Rock’s history, partnered with the Bureau of Land Management, the Morongo Basin Historical Society and several community groups for three trash-collection efforts she initiated in 2016. In all, they removed over seven tons of trash from the surrounding site.
Newman partnered with the Yucca Valley’s Hi-Desert Nature Museum to develop Our Giant Rock: A Community Touchstone in the Mojave, a multimedia project and programming series funded by California Humanities, scheduled for public launch in 2020. Newman will bring together an archaeologist, explosives specialist and other research experts to resolve some of the many mysteries of Giant Rock. For example, was Giant Rock the locus for regional tribal occupation and spiritual activities? To what extent did federal authorities investigate Critzer and Van Tassel, and, if so, what did they find? And, finally, what caused Giant Rock to split in 2000?
No doubt, as time passes, Giant Rock and Van Tassel’s mythical legacies will continue to evolve. Over deep time, the incessant graffiti will have long faded and the boulder’s secrets and lore will be lost. One thing is sure: Giant Rock will persist as it always has—stoically and with fortitude—well into the next millennium.
Opening photo from a collection of Ralph Crane’s photographs of the Giant Rock Interplanetary Spaceship Convention for LIFE Magazine, May 27, 1957. © Time Inc. Be sure to check out Calling All Earthlings, a film by Jonathan Berman about George Van Tassel and the Integratron. This article is co-published with KCET Artbound. Visit Artbound’s Mojave Project page here.
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FOOTNOTES (click to open/close)
[1] The Morongo Basin’s Hi-Desert Star reported on February 23, 2000, that Leslie and Larry Blunden of Palmdale, among others, had been camping at Giant Rock the morning of the split, thus recording the time of the actual event.
[2] These anecdotal accounts fail to provide any anthropological evidence for such claims, but it seems they originate from a single document authored by George Van Tassel, a copy of which is in the possession of the current Integratron owners. The authenticated handwritten letter details Giant Rock’s early Native American history as told to Van Tassel by area Indians and also to Charlie Reche, a well-known rancher, who sold the property on which the Integratron is located to Van Tassel.
[3] Joanne Karl, one of Integratron’s current owners, was present for the long dance ceremony headed by Shri Naath Devi and described the event. Joanne Karl, email correspondence with the author, April 27, 2018.
[4] The author was not able to contact Shri Naath Devi to comment on or confirm this story.
[5] Critzer is a variant of Kritzer. Both spellings were used interchangeably in various historical newspaper accounts. The 1940 U.S. Census for Twentynine Palms, San Bernardino County, California, lists his name as “Critzer.” However, his death certificate on file at findagrave.com spells his last name as “Kritzer”—a misspelling.
[6] Critzer’s February 25, 1928, notarized Merchant Marine application states that he is a native U.S. citizen and not a German national as some previous accounts have stated.
[7] “His Roof is a Rock,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 136, no. 2, February 1940, 136. This feature on Critzer’s unique home states that he arrived at Giant Rock in 1931.
[8] Giant Rock sits on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
[9] Ed Ainsworth, “Plans for ‘Out of This World’ Laboratory in Desert Disclosed,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1954.
[10] Technically, the Riverside County deputies were out of jurisdiction, as Giant Rock lies within San Bernardino County.
[11] Ainsworth, “Plans for ‘Out of This World.’”
[12] Sasha Archibald, “Mass Effect,” Cabinet Magazine Issue 53, Spring 2014. Archibald states that Van Tassel most likely exaggerated his career resume: “He [Van Tassel] told the 1940 census-takers he was a tradesman, a tool and die maker.”
[13] George Van Tassel, I Rode A Flying Saucer (Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Co., 1952), 18.
[14] G. W. Van Tassel, Into This World and Out Again, (Self-published, 1956), 80. This story is recounted in Van Tassel’s other books as well as the June 18, 1964, KVOS Webster television interview, “The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel,” KVOS Channel 12 films archive, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Washington University.
[15] “Operation Tumbler-Snapper,” The Nuclear Weapon Archive, accessed May 2018, https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Tumblers.html. Tumbler-Snapper released about 15,500 kilocuries of radioiodine (I-131) into the atmosphere (for comparison, Trinity released about 3,200 kilocuries of radioiodine). Although this was only some 40 percent more than that released by Buster-Jangle, unfavorable weather patterns caused dramatically higher civilian radiation exposures (about fifteen-fold). The total thyroid tissue exposure amounted to 110 million person-rads, about 29 percent of all exposure due to continental nuclear tests. This can be expected to eventually cause about 34,000 cases of thyroid cancer, leading to some 1,750 deaths.
[16] Desert Center is technically in the Colorado Desert, but near the ecological transition zone where these two deserts meet.
[17] George Van Tassel, When Stars Look Down (Los Angeles: The Kruckeberg Press, 1976), 140.
[18] There are many other colorful Biblical reinterpretations described in When Stars Look Down, including this gem on page 37: “This mass pickup of people will take place very soon, prior to the planet’s rebalancing on new poles. This cataclysm will wipe out the destructive mammon lovers who will be left on the surface.” Continuing on page 141 Van Tassel states: “The time is short. You are either an instrument of God or a pawn of the devil. Jesus is about to land amidst you. Are you ready to be ‘taken up’” or are you one who ‘be left.’”
[19] In addition to the books previously mentioned, Van Tassel authored Into This World and Out Again (1956), The Council of Seven Lights (1958) and Religion and Science Merged (1958).
[20] These numbers can’t be confirmed and are based solely on Van Tassel’s own accounts.
[21] Jennifer McCartney, “A Time Machine in the Mojave Desert,” The Atlantic, February 20, 2015.
[22] Ainsworth, “Plans for ‘Out of This World.’”
[23] During the 1964 KVOS TV interview Van Tassel states the shorter version of the “formula” at 15:30.
[24] Westernized hypnosis has its roots in Mesmerism. Asian healing practices such as reiki and qigong share similarities with Mesmerism.
[25] Archibald, “Mass Effect.” Lakhosvsky’s research and the Multiple Wave Oscillator are described in detail by Archibald.
[26] The Integratron was listed on the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service in 2019.
[27] An example of Van Tassel’s considerable ego is apparent in this passage in When Stars Look Down on page 177: “It’s a strange thing that George is involved in so many firsts. Maybe this is where the expression evolved of ‘let George do it.’ Here we have George Crile’s research tied in with George Lakhovsky’s principles, being extended by George Van Tassel. After all, George Washington was our first President, and Nikola Tesla was financed by George Westinghouse. Nikola Tesla’s discoveries made Westinghouse what it is today. Then there is the contrast of opposites because Ge-or-ge is ge twice with an “or” in-between, and Westinghouse’s largest competitor is General Electric or G.E., and further in the letter expression of meanings, G.E. means to generate energy.”