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George Van Tassel was such an important influence on the early contactee movement of the 1950s that he has earned a place in Jerome Clark's "The UFO Book, Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial." 

According to Clark, "Born in Jefferson, Ohio, on March 12, 1910, George Van Tassel developed an early interest in aviation. In 1930 he moved to California, where for the next eleven years he worked for Douglas Aircraft. In 1941, he became a personal flight inspector of experimental aircraft for Howard Hughes, and two years later he went to work for Lockheed as a flight inspector on Constellation aircraft."

With that kind of technical background, steeped in the state-of-the-art aircraft technology of his time, it seems unlikely that Van Tassel would take flight with a belief in benevolent aliens. Needless to say, the story continues. 

"In 1947, Van Tassel and his wife and three daughters left Los Angeles," Clark continued, "and moved into the high desert between Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree, California. Amid the 2600 acres he leased from the U.S. Government was a seven-story boulder, called simply Giant Rock." 

One of the current owners of the Van Tassel property, Nancy Karl [about whom more later], explained that, "Giant Rock was considered to be the largest freestanding boulder in the world. It stands seven stories high and it's somewhere upwards of 120,000 tons. It's just a massive boulder." 

The Van Tassels' move to Giant Rock was preceded by tragedy, however. 

"There was a man living underneath Giant Rock," Karl said, "by the name of Frank Critzer. Critzer was a miner, a prospector, and he was also a short wave radio guy. He had an antenna on the top of Giant Rock. He hollowed out underneath the rock and lived there. Well, it was during the time of World War II, and a rumor went around that Critzer was a spy for the Germans. 

"George Van Tassel used to come bring him food and help him out because this man lived on very little," Karl continued. "So the word was out that this Frank Critzer guy might be a spy because he had a radio under there. The authorities came to talk to him and he wouldn't come out. So they threw a tear gas canister in there, not knowing that he had dynamite for his prospecting. And they blew him to bits." 

Van Tassel repaired and re-hollowed the damaged former home of Critzer, and also opened a working airport, a dude ranch and a small restaurant called the Come On Inn on the site.
"People would come from many miles around to have their hamburgers and pies," Karl said. 
Van Tassel continued to evolve into the contactee he would eventually become. Along the way, he studied the work of Nikola Tesla, among others. 

"George was very interested," Karl said, "in where science meets religion, if you will, where science meets spirit. So he began meditating." 

Van Tassel's interest in meditation led him to what he believed was genuine contact with extraterrestrials. He claimed to have been taken aboard a spaceship by aliens who "taught him things and told him things."

"He said they were from Venus," Karl said. "And they told him that humanity was not evolving fast enough to know how to heal themselves and to live more harmoniously and in peace."

It was the Venusians who first suggested the Integratron to Van Tassel.

"They gave him the idea," Karl explained, "that he could build a machine that would heal people. It would also expand their minds and on some level spiritually awaken them. These were products of this process of healing, of rejuvenation. So they gave him the plans to build the Integratron.

"He also worked and studied and talked with many other kinds of scientists who were working in the area of Tesla fields and other free energy devices in order to develop the plans to build the Integratron, which was and is a giant electrostatic generator." 

Van Tassel would spend 18 years constructing the Integratron, a 38-foot high, 50-foot diameter, non-metallic structure. Meanwhile, in the early 1950s, he also began to lead conventions of UFO believers that drew thousands to Giant Rock and the Integratron over the years. 

"There were channelers and people who were other types of UFO contactees," Karl said. "George Adamski used to come out, and he and George Van Tassel were friends. So George became fairly well known. He was extremely outspoken and somewhat aggressive in his speech-in criticizing the government and the way that they were squashing free energy devices. And dangerously so I think. If you want my opinion, I think it did him in." 

Van Tassel also published a newspaper called "The Proceedings" and opened a school called The Ministry of Universal Wisdom, for which he established a board of directors. He continued to channel "space beings" until his death in February of 1978. 

"I know he died of a heart attack in a hotel room," Karl said. "Many people believe that was no accident, that there was foul play involved. Then as soon as he died-there's a lot of confusion around what actually happened there-but a lot of the board of directors just disbanded, they just disappeared. Many people think that they were afraid."

Karl has since heard legends and rumors about some of the events alleged to have taken place when Van Tassel was still alive. 

"It's difficult for us to tell about the credibility of the stories," she said, "but there are a few witnesses who said that George had direct contact with UFOs. There were eyewitnesses to that. We've talked to a few of those people, and they say it really happened. It's believed that the space people were going to participate in the final phase of turning the Integratron on. I don't know if that's true either, but that's some of the stories that come through." 

After Van Tassel's death, the Integratron passed through a series of owners. Karl told the story of how she and her sister Joanne and a couple of partners took over the property. 

"We came here in 1986. Joanne and I were on a very deep spiritual path in our lives," Karl began. "And a dear friend of ours said that the desert is a really good place for a spiritual retreat. 'You should go out there. And while you're out there, there's this cool place. You should go see it.' So we did. The first time we ever came here, we absolutely fell in love with it. So much so that it became our life's passion from that day on. We came here just to water the trees and dig trenches and do anything we could. We worked on the property a lot, in order just to be here."

The Karl sisters came to believe that the Integratron, along with being a rejuvenation machine, also facilitated contact with higher realms. 

"We've seen some really beautiful and unusual things [in this area] that we could call contact. So we brought groups of people here on retreat because we had seen what happened for us. We were having some very profound spiritual awakenings and mind expansion just by meditating and being on retreat out here."

The sisters also came to know the Van Tassel family, who still live in the area.

"We heard their story and felt that George Van Tassel's life's work and his family and their lineage were not really being honored for what they did, for what they offered. 'The Dome' [the sisters' affectionate name for the Integratron] was never going to be finished unless someone like us who honored and respected that work stepped in and did it. We became fairly obsessive and possessive about who owned it, who did what with it. We were very careful. We said to our friend, who owned it at the time, 'If you ever sell this, you have to sell it to us or I'll haunt you the rest of my life.'"

In 1999, the Karl sisters' friend did indeed make the offer to sell the Integratron. Nancy cashed out some stock options from her work as a high-tech marketing person in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area and bought the property along with Joanne and two other partners she prefers not to name. 

"We're paying the mortgage on the place," Karl said, "and we love it. We'll hold it for our children so that it can be restored and finished. We want to finish it."

However, none of the original design has been passed down. 

"I have never, in fifteen years of coming here," Karl said, "seen a set of architectural plans for the Integratron, which is unfortunate. We're still kind of in search of those. Many of the people [who participated in the building] have scattered to the four winds." 

The Integratron is open to the public for tours the first three Sundays of every month. The group also promotes different kinds of events, including acoustic music concerts and lectures by spiritual teachers. 

"There's actually a very high-ranking Tibetan Buddhist lama who's been teaching out of the Integratron," Karl said. "He was sent here by the Dalai Lama directly, who knows about the Integratron somehow. We also rent it. There's Skywatch International and Mystery Schools and different groups of people who want to rent it, for whatever their purposes are. We're very careful about what those are, though. No wild parties. Even though it's a great party zone, it's not a party zone. 

"We're very sensitive about that," she continued. "We're very careful about what gets transmitted in and through this building because we believe those transmissions of sound or thoughts or energy travel around the Earth. We believe, as do many others, even geophysicists, that the Integratron's geometry, its relation to Giant Rock, gives it a direct relationship to the Earth's grid. And any transmissions that come in through the Integratron go out across the planet. So we are very concerned that those be of a positive nature." 

Karl summed up what her and the others' purposes are in their dedication to the Intergratron. 

"Our work at the Integratron," she said, "has been about-number one-honoring the old history and getting the story straight about George Van Tassel's life's work. And the second thing that we're about, all four of us as co-owners, is what we call the New History of the Integratron, which we believe is about creating an environment that is a gathering place where science and spirit meet, meaning trans-denominational events as well as scientific gatherings. 

"We're dedicated to the research and the understanding of what the Integratron's gift to humanity really is," Karl concluded. "If it came from the space people, great. That's even more exciting." 

[To find about scheduled tours of the Integratron or to receive bulletins about upcoming events held there, e-mail the group at Theintegratron@aol.com There is also a web site at: www.integratron.com/Welcome.html]


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