George Van Tassel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| George Washington Van Tassel | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 12, 1910 Jefferson, Ohio |
| Died | February 9, 1978 (aged 67) Landers, California |
| Occupation(s) | Inventor, Pilot and Ufologist |
George Washington Van Tassel (March 12, 1910 – February 9, 1978) was an American contactee, ufologist and author.
George-Van-Tassel-WikipediaEarly life
Van Tassel was born in Jefferson, Ohio in 1910, and grew up in a fairly prosperous middle-class family. He finished high school in the 10th grade and held a job at a small municipal airport near Cleveland; he also acquired a private pilot license. At age 20, he moved to California, where at first he worked as an automobile mechanic at a garage owned by an uncle.[1]
While pumping gas at the garage, he met Frank Critzer, an eccentric loner who claimed to be working a mine somewhere near Giant Rock, a 7-story boulder near Landers, California in the Mojave Desert. Frank Critzer was claimed by others to be a German immigrant During World War II, however, he was born in the US. Critzer was under suspicion as a German spy and killed himself by a dynamite explosion during a police siege at the Rock in 1942. Upon receiving news of Critzer’s death, Van Tassel applied for a lease of the small abandoned airport near Giant Rock from the Bureau of Land Management, and was eventually given a Federal Government contract to develop and maintain the airstrip.[2]
Van Tassel became an aircraft mechanic and flight inspector who at various times between 1930 and 1947 worked for Douglas Aircraft, Hughes Aircraft, and Lockheed. While at Hughes Aircraft he was their Top Flight Inspector.[2] In 1947, Van Tassel left Southern California‘s booming aerospace industry to live in the desert with his family. At first, he lived a simple existence in the rooms Frank Critzer had dug out under Giant Rock. Van Tassel eventually built a new home, a café, a gas station, a store, a small airstrip, and a guest ranch beside the Rock.[2]
Integratron
Historical marker near Integratron in Landers
Main article: Integratron
George Van Tassel started hosting group meditation in 1953 in a room underneath Giant Rock, excavated by Frank Critzer. That year, according to Van Tassel the occupant of a space ship from the planet Venus woke him up, invited him on board his space ship, and both verbally and telepathically gave him a technique for rejuvenating the human body. In 1954, Van Tassel and others began building what they called the “Integratron” to perform the rejuvenation.
According to Van Tassel, the Integratron was to be a structure for scientific research into time, anti-gravity and at extending human life, built partially upon the research of Nikola Tesla and Georges Lakhovsky. Van Tassel described the Integratron as being created for scientific and spiritual research with the aim to recharge and rejuvenate people’s cells, “a time machine for basic research on rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel”.[3] The domed wood structure has a rotating metal apparatus on the outside he called an “electrostatic dirod”.
Van Tassel claimed it was made of non-ferromagnetic materials: wood, concrete, glass, and fibreglass, lacking even metal screws or nails. The Integratron was never fully completed due to Van Tassel’s sudden death a few weeks before the official opening. In recent times some people who visit the unfinished Integratron claim to be rejuvenated by staying there, and experiencing “sound baths” inside.[4]
Conventions and organizations[edit]
Van Tassel was a classic 1950s contactee in the mold of George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci and many others. He hosted “The Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention” annually beside the Rock, from 1953 to 1978, which attracted at its peak in 1959 as many as 10,000 attendees. Guests trekked to the desert by car or landed airplanes on Van Tassel’s small airstrip, called Giant Rock Airport.[3]
Over the years, every famous contactee of the period appeared personally at these conventions, and many more not-so-famous ones. References often state that the first and most famous contactee, George Adamski, pointedly boycotted these conventions; however, Adamski did, in fact attend the third convention, held in 1955, where he gave a 35-minute lecture and was interviewed by Edward J. Ruppelt, once head of the Air Force Project Blue Book. It was apparently the only such convention Adamski ever attended.[3]
Van Tassel founded a metaphysics research organization called The Ministry of Universal Wisdom, and The College of Universal Wisdom to codify the spiritual revelations he was now regularly receiving via communications with the people from Space.[2]
Death
George Van Tassel died in Santa Ana while printing a publication and visiting friends.[5]
Publications
Van Tassel’s book, I Rode A Flying Saucer (1952, 1955), recounts his claims of receiving “cosmic wisdom” from “Solgonda” and a large number of other people from space. Among his other works are Into This World and Out Again (1956), The Council of Seven Lights (1958), Religion and Science Merged, and When Stars Look Down.
See also
References
- ^ “I Rode A Flying Saucer – George Van Tassel”. Scribd.com. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c d “When Stars Look Down – by George van Tassel”. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2017-09-09.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c “Integratron’s George Van Tassel and the Giant Rock Spaceship Conventions with George Hunt Williamson 1950s”. Labyrinthina.com. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
- ^ “Integratron”. Integratron.com. 1966-11-17. Retrieved 2013-09-19.
- ^ “George Van Tassel Dies”. The Desert Sun. 14 February 1978. p. A2.
Sources
- Lewis, James R., editor, UFOs and Popular Culture, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2000. ISBN 1-57607-265-7.
- Ronald D. Story, editor, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, NY, NY: New American Library, 2001. ISBN 0-451-20424-7.
External links[edit]
- “A Brief History of Giant Rock Covering the Last 90 Years (1887–1977)” Archived 2018-08-19 at the Wayback Machine, integratron.com; accessed 2 July 2017.
- Reminiscence of George Van Tassel, ufoevidence.org; accessed 2 July 2017.
- “A planned revival of Van Tassel’s Spacecraft Conventions”. USA Today. 27 April 2006.
- Theriault, Michelle (August 5, 2005). “Big enough to see from Venus”. Archived from the original on November 7, 2005.
| hideAuthority control | |
|---|---|
| International | ISNIVIAFWorldCat Identities |
| National | United States |
- 1910 births
- 1978 deaths
- 20th-century American writers
- 20th-century apocalypticists
- American UFO writers
- Writers from California
- Channellers
- Contactees
- History of the Mojave Desert region
- People from Jefferson, Ohio
- People from San Bernardino County, California
- Ufologists
- UFO religions
Erratic behavior
Giant Rock has inspired extremes of human reverence and abuse
https://www.hcn.org/issues/41.21/erratic-behavior
Name Giant Rock
Location Southern Mojave Desert, northwest of Landers, California
Size Seven stories tall
Claim to fame The geologic erratic has been the site of UFO conventions, epic raves and meditation gatherings
Visit You can visit (and even spend the night in) the nearby Integratron. Visit www.integratron.com for details.
Landers, California
It is deep summer on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert — a hallucinatory landscape of mesas and basins, dotted with creosote bushes and Joshua trees that dance in the heat of late afternoon. Here, just off Old Woman Springs Road and down a rutted path, sits Giant Rock. Slate-gray and shaped like a tilted egg, it stands seven stories high on a patch of bare Bureau of Land Management scrub. There’s not much out here, just snakes and sand and emptiness all the way to the horizon. It’s sort of a poor man’s Ayers Rock, a place that has inspired its human visitors to extremes of both reverence and abuse.
Local legend has it that the Chemehuevi people, who have lived in the high desert for thousands of years, witnessed the rock’s arrival: Their ancestors watched it float down from the sky in a beam of sunlight, light as a bubble, before it came to rest on the Earth. Supposedly, tribes from all over the Southwest came to see this sacred rock, but only the highest-ranking chiefs were allowed to lay their hands on it.
Giant Rock found devotees of a different sort in the 20th century. One was Frank Critzer, a German immigrant who was trying to make a living as a prospector in the desert. Critzer excavated a home under the rock and was living there when he met George Van Tassel, a Los Angeles aeronautical engineer and test pilot with an interest in extraterrestrials. Critzer died in the 1940s; according to some accounts, local law enforcement, who suspected him of being a Nazi spy, raided his underground home with tear-gas canisters and set off a store of dynamite.
After Critzer’s death, Van Tassel moved to Giant Rock. In the early 1950s, Van Tassel claimed that Venusians had contacted him during a meditation session and instructed him to devote his life to building a “human rejuvenation chamber” on the “energy vortex” surrounding this stark spot. So he constructed a white dome-shaped “Integratron” a few miles away and hosted UFO conventions, which, at their peak, drew upwards of 10,000 people. Van Tassel and his wife, Eva, also operated the “Giant Rock Interplanetary Airstrip” as well as a restaurant next to the rock. Howard Hughes, for whom Van Tassel once worked as a test pilot, occasionally dropped in for a slice of apple pie.
After Van Tassel died, the spacecraft conventions ended, and Giant Rock became another backroad Mojave curiosity, as neglected as the ramshackle trailers that dot the landscape here. But its remoteness held a lure of its own, and in the 1980s and 1990s, the rock became the site of epic parties and open-air raves held under the star-spackled desert sky. In the 1990s, a teenager from the nearby town of Joshua Tree died at such a party, overdosing on the drug GHB.
The most recent chapter in the rock’s story is weird even by California standards. On Feb. 20, 2000, at 8:20 in the morning, Giant Rock split apart for no apparent reason. A slice the size of an eighteen-wheel truck fell away, exposing a pure white granite interior. A Los Angeles shaman and his followers, who said that they’d been praying at the rock for days, claimed that the split fulfilled a prophecy. For their part, BLM personnel theorized that heat from years of bonfires might be responsible.
Recently, Giant Rock has found new acolytes. Members of the Friends of Giant Rock occasionally remove graffiti and pick up trash from the area, but their cleanup efforts seldom endure. Today, Giant Rock is burn-scarred and scrawled with graffiti — Slayer, a few swastikas, I Love You Lover. Car parts, broken beer bottles and a shredded sleeping bag litter the ground, reminders that the rock’s strange pull — and its devotees’ irreverent worship — endure.
