Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2025
Giant Rock, the Integratron, the tales of George Van Tassel, and more
By Brent Raynes
Giant Rock UFO convention
The Integratron at Landers, California
Giant Rock, said to have been a huge seven-story high boulder in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, came to play a major part in ufology’s contactee movement early on. It all began when one George W. Van Tassel (1910-1978), a man who had moved from Ohio to California in 1930 and who for the next 11 years worked for Douglas Aircraft, then in 1941 was a personal flight inspector of experimental aircraft for Howard Hughes, and two years later worked as a flight inspector on Constellation aircraft for Lockheed, in 1947 decided to move his family from Los Angeles into the high desert country between Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree. He leased from the government 2,600 acres, which included Giant Rock.
A man named Frank Critzer, who Van Tassel had been acquainted with, had reportedly worked a mine near Giant Rock, and lived beneath the Rock itself, having used dynamite to make living quarters there. In 1942, Critzer had run into some sort of trouble with three local deputies and lost his life when dynamite he had stored in the underground quarters exploded. UFO author Jerome Clark noted: “Accounts differ as to whether he committed suicide, or the dynamite detonated accidently when the officers heaved a tear-gas grenade into Critzer’s kitchen.” Van Tassel, along with his wife and three daughters, initially took residence under the Rock. Van Tassel made improvements and installed electricity. In addition, over time, he built a café, a store, a gas station, a small airstrip and a dude ranch.
On January 6, 1952, Van Vassel began claiming that he was receiving telepathic messages from space beings. “Lutbunn, senior in command first wave, planet patrol, realms of Schare [pronounced Share-ee, a saucer station in space]. We have your contact aboard 80,000 feet above this place.” Soon alleged messages from many other extraterrestrial personalities were coming through. It was one that Van Tassel called Ashtar that became what Clark called a “metaphysical superstar,” as over the years many others claimed to have channeled messages from Ashtar. The first contactee I met in 1971 in Canada, in Toronto, Ontario, named Joan Howard, claimed to have taken messages herself from a variety of ETs. She didn’t trust Ashtar though, for what it was worth. In early 1953, Van Tassel began holding weekly Friday night channeling sessions at Giant Rock. Then on August 24th he claimed a physical encounter where a being named Solganda guided him to a flying saucer parked nearby, where he met three of Solganda’s fellow crew members and was given a tour of the inside of the spaceship.
The Integratron
“Soon the space people were imparting plans for an electrical rejuvenation machine which would be called the Integratron,” Clark noted. “In public appearances and in the pages of the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, Van Tassel began raising funds for its construction. He said that when the machine was ready, it would rejuvenate as many as 10,000 persons a day. Their bodies would not outwardly return to youth, but the cells would be recharged. By 1959, a four-story domed structure, 55 feet in diameter, was in place, having been built mostly of wood and without nails and screws, iron, or steel.”
Dr. Arthur Cushman
Retired neurosurgeon Arthur Cushman of Hendersonville, Tennessee, had a remarkable story to share from his childhood spent out in California, telling me about his father and Van Tassel’s Integratron. “I had been out there many times at Giant Rock Airport,” he said. “And I had been out to the Integratron, which is near Joshua Tree. My father worked on a doctorate degree in advanced physics and mathematics. It was a new field called quantum mechanics.”
Cushman said that the Integratron was supposed to rejuvenate people and also somehow allow participants at the site to engage in time travel. His father was responsible for electrical wiring done on this building for that purpose. He said he was very interested in acoustics too and that his dad had the scientific knowledge and foresight to make it work. Cushman recalled he wasn’t yet in grade school when something quite frightening happened. “We lived in kind of a rural area with lemon and orange groves,” he said. “This black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house. Nobody even had a Cadillac around there except the funeral home. These men got out and they were wearing dark suits and those fedora hats, and nobody wore those in California when I was a kid. They came up to the house. I noticed they had kind of dark skin. Not real dark, and they talked with a strange accent. We had some Italians who lived down the street and I felt that I recognized that they were probably Italian.”
“They wanted to know if my father was there and I said, ‘Yes.’ He was out working on the shop that we had behind the house. So, I went and got him, and he told me to leave. We lived in a real small house and being a snoopy kid, I listened to what they said and they said, ‘Do you know why we’re here?’ And he said, ‘I have some kind of an idea.’ They said, ‘We know what you’re doing, how far along you are with that time travel project. If you don’t stop it immediately your children and your wife and you are in grave danger. Do you understand?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and they left, and I later found out talking with some people in the Joshua Tree area that they also visited Van Tassel. Ron Hubbard became very angry at the whole business apparently, so my father never went out there and never mentioned it again. I kind of repressed it, and at that same time a black helicopter, presumably from 29 Palms went there and totally dismantled all of the wiring in the place.”
Years later, Cushman knew some people in the Scientology Church, and he questioned them about the incident. He felt they might know something since he said “they keep records of everything and keep them in various hidden repositories or something out in the desert or wherever.”
What was he told? “The Men in Black, or whatever, were from the Vatican, from Naples, Italy, and the black helicopters were from 29 Palms Marine base.”
Why would the Vatican be involved in such an operation? Cushman speculated that if someone successfully acquired time travel capability and went back to the time of Christ and discovered what really happened, as well as things that the Church had done to people through the years, it might prove embarrassing and damaging for them.
Chad Meek
I asked Chad, “What was your uncle George's involvement with the famous millionaire Howard Hughes? By the way, I read where Hughes had seen UFOs while flying? Ever hear of him seeing anything at Giant Rock or with your uncle?”
“Well George worked pretty close to him as flight engineer and left for more money at I believe Lockheed,” Chad replied. “They stayed in contact and Hughes gave my uncle some cash for the Integratron. I have no doubt of my uncle’s abilities to channel information from what he called the Universal Mind. But the connection between the Spruce Goose and the Integratron is too close not to connect the dots. They were both made without metals and the Integratron was really geared to medical research - something that Hughes was very interested in. He had to make a forced landing out at Giant Rock after getting too close to a rainbow-colored space craft and losing power near Morongo Valley.”
“Giant Rock was one of the most unique places on earth that touched people from around the world. Every President from Truman to Nixon had their eyes and ears monitoring this obscure place out in the middle of nowhere. Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, Howard Hughes, Robert Plant to Charlize Theron to Jay Leno and countless others have made the pilgrimage to Giant Rock. It is one of our planets sacred crossroads where even seeing and catching a ride on a spaceship is possible. The other thing I hope to achieve is to help in the battle for full and final disclosure about all of this. Churchill and Truman were reported to have been so paranoid about the population not going to church and not paying taxes for their various Military Industrial Complex buddies that they did everything they could to suppress any independent revelation of these close encounters of the third and fourth kind. Movies are the new books and if you can entertain audiences for a couple of hours, they may just decide to do some serious research on their own. When they do, they will never be satisfied by anything but real and immediate disclosure of any event that occurs between those out there and us living here.”
Chad recalled witnessing his uncle George Van Tassel channeling at Giant Rock. “My uncle’s voice would completely change, and it would change from one entity that he was channeling to another. It was distinctly noticeable. And then, of course, the crown of his head would light up and it was literally like there was a spotlight on him, and so people who actually witnessed these sessions, and, of course, then the results afterward, they were believers. He had some staunch supports.”
Chad became a believer himself. He experienced peculiar light phenomena when in the room located beneath Giant Rock, where many channeling sessions had been done. “It happened twice to me within a week when I was seven-years-old,” Chad shared with me. “I had been used to going down there and playing an old upright piano with all of the kids. But I wanted to play it by myself and when the kids, brothers, sisters, and cousins, left I stayed back and after about five minutes I began to feel warm and looked up and the top of the rock ceiling was beginning to illuminate and sparkle while permeating downward on all sides. I ran up the stairs and went and played with the kids.”
“I believe it was the following Monday, and I was playing outside the rock with my brother, and I made him go down there with me while I played the piano and after about ten minutes he got bored and ran up the stairs. Again, within about five minutes the top of the rock began to illuminate and sparkle and once again I ran up the stairs. After that I would never go down there with anyone.”
Giant Rock was reportedly considered sacred by local Native Americans and Van Tassel believed that it produced a kind of powerful magnetic field, a piezo-electric type effect. “The night when my maternal grandmother died (the Cherokee side where I hold both a federal and tribal card) I was sleeping between my brothers, and she came floating down the hallway of her home that we were staying at. I was terrified and doing every kind of movement to get my brain dead and comatose brothers to wake up to no avail. It became apparent that I was the psychic in the family at an early age and that all of these things were for my eyes only.”
Chad claimed a number of UFO sightings and he even claimed being beamed aboard a craft. He told me: “I remember being teleported through a window into a waiting silver disk. My brothers Phil and Brad were in the room but would not wake. I was out on a table and there were four greys 4’ 8” in height with dolphin feeling skin. They probed with long instruments that resembled skewers. Telepathically they told me that I wouldn’t remember and would not feel pain. I woke up with a high fever and stuttered.”
Why are certain places and certain people seemingly touched, or shall we say bewitched by extraordinary and impossible to verify experiences and visions that can border on the razor’s edge of reality and fantasy? Are some correct in speculating that some of us may unconsciously be participating in a situation where we’re co-creators of a kind of simulated projection of reality, while at the same time the reverse may be true, that an outside intelligence may be capable of projecting and intruding upon our perceptions of reality? That would most certainly make identifying the source for such extraordinary experiences very difficult to prove or expose to the proverbial light of day. It would be an immensely challenging process to successfully accomplish.
